Nadia Schadlow, Ph.D.
MITRE Senior Visiting Fellow; Former Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy, Assistant to the President
Nadia Schadlow, a MITRE senior visiting fellow, is a strategist and practitioner of national security who served in leadership positions in government and the private sector, including the National Security Council and the Department of Defense. Most recently, she served as deputy national security advisor for strategy and assistant to the president of the United States, a role in which she served as the chief architect of the 2017 U.S. National Security Strategy. That strategy paper was the first since the end of the Cold War to identify the return of great power rivalries as a central feature of global geopolitics. The strategy also advanced the concept of a National Security Innovation Base and assessed the potential impact of disruptive technologies on U.S. national security interests. While at MITRE, Schadlow will continue to work on these issues.
Previously, Schadlow served as a senior executive at the Smith Richardson Foundation. In that role, she focused on cultivating and investing in research and policy solutions to improve the United States’ security and strategic competitiveness. Schadlow developed and managed portfolios that included U.S. defense policy, cybersecurity, geopolitical trends, and the modernization of U.S. foreign assistance.
Schadlow is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute. She also serves on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy and the Reagan Institute Task Force on 21st Century National Security Technology and Workforce. Her 2017 book, “War and the Art of Governance,” explored the problems of political and economic reconstruction faced by the United States during wartime.
Schadlow received a bachelor’s degree in government and Soviet studies from Cornell University. She earned a master’s degree and Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
