Elizabeth A. Stanley is an associate professor of security studies at Georgetown University, with appointments in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Department of Government. She is also the founder of the Mind Fitness Training Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to teaching skills for enhancing performance and building resilience to stress. Drawing on her military experience, research expertise, and mindfulness training, Stanley created Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training (MMFT) and has taught it to troops before deployment to combat. Ninth-generation U.S. Army, she served as a U.S. Army military intelligence officer in Korea, Germany, and on deployments in the Balkans, leaving service with the rank of Captain. She has extensive experience with mind fitness techniques, including long-term periods of intensive practice in the United States and Burma (Myanmar). She also has training in body-based trauma therapies.
Stanley has published widely on a variety of topics related to mind fitness, resilience, military effectiveness and innovation, war termination, and national security. She is currently writing a book called Techno-Blinders: How the Cult of Technology is Endangering U.S. National Security and What to Do About It (Stanford University Press, forthcoming). She is also the author of Paths to Peace: Domestic Coalition Shifts, War Termination and the Korean War (Stanford University Press, 2009), which won the 2009 Edgar S. Furniss Award for the best first book in the field of national and international security, and co-editor (with Risa A. Brooks) of Creating Military Power: The Sources of Military Effectiveness (Stanford University Press, 2007).
She has served on the U.S. Army Science Board, the National Security Advisory Panel of the Sandia National Laboratories, and the executive board of Women in International Security. She was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard’s Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, and she has served as the associate director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University.
Her research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the G.D. Searle Foundation, the John Kluge Foundation, the Department of Defense Centers for Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, the Office of Naval Research, and Sandia National Laboratories.
Stanley has a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University, an M.B.A. from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and a B.A. in Soviet and East European Studies from Yale University.
