President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Jessica Mathews is president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an international research organization founded in 1910, with offices in Washington D.C. and Moscow. Her career includes posts in the executive and legislative branches of government, in management and research in the non-profit arena and in journalism.

From 1977-1979, she was director of the Office of Global Issues on the National Security Council staff in the White House. Her responsibilities included nuclear proliferation, conventional arms sales policy, chemical and biological warfare and human rights. In 1993, she returned to government as deputy to the undersecretary of state for Global Affairs.

From 1980-1982, she was a member of the Editorial Board of the Washington Post, where she covered energy, environment, science, technology, arms control, health and other issues.

From 1982-1993, she served as founding vice president and director of research (1982-1989) of the World Resources Institute, an internationally known center for policy research on domestic and international environmental and natural resource management issues. From 1993-1997, she was a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, also serving as acting director of the Council's Washington program.

From 1991-1997, she authored a weekly column for the Washington Post which appeared nationwide and in the International Herald Tribune. She has also written for the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and other scientific and foreign policy journals. She co-edited The Earth as Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere Over the Past 300 Years (1990) and co-authored and edited Preserving the Global Environment: The Challenge of Shared Leadership (1991). Her seminal 1997 Foreign Affairs article "Power Shift," was chosen by the editors as one of the most influential in the journal's 75 years.

Dr. Mathews came to Washington in 1973 as a Congressional Science Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She continued in Congress on the staff of the House Interior Committee and in 1975-1976, served as national issues director in Congressman Morris Udall's presidential campaign, the highest ranking woman in any national campaign that year.

She is currently a trustee of the Brookings Institution; the Rockefeller Foundation; the Inter-American Dialogue (Vice-Chair); and the Surface Transportation Policy Project, a national coalition working on domestic transportation issues, of which she was co-founder. She has previously served on the boards of Radcliffe College, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Joyce Foundation among others. She is a member of the Environmental Advisory Committee of Air Products Corporation, a Fortune 200 company, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission.

She graduated magna cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1967, and received her Ph.D. degree in molecular biology from the California Institute of Technology in 1973. She appears regularly on radio and television and was the subject of one of the most heavily watched of Bill Moyers' World of Ideas series. Mathews was born in New York City in 1946 and raised there, graduating from the Brearley School. She has two children.