Michael McFaul is the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in Political Science, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, all at Stanford University. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1995 and served as FSI Director from 2015 to 2025. He is also an international affairs analyst for MSNOW.

McFaul served for five years in the Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014).

McFaul has authored ten books and edited several others, including, most recently, Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder, as well as From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia, (a New York Times bestseller) Advancing Democracy Abroad: Why We Should, How We Can; and Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin.

He is a recipient of numerous awards, including an honorary PhD from Montana State University; the Order for Merits to Lithuania from President Gitanas Nausea of Lithuania; Order of Merit of Third Degree from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, and the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford University. In 2015, he was the Distinguished Mingde Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center at Peking University.

McFaul was born and raised in Montana. He received his B.A. in International Relations and Slavic Languages and his M.A. in Soviet and East European Studies from Stanford University in 1986. As a Rhodes Scholar, he completed his D. Phil. in International Relations at Oxford University in 1991. 

Ivetta Sergeeva specializes in comparative social science, focusing on political behavior, civil society, citizenship and migration. In her research, she employs a mixed-methods approach, emphasizing surveys, statistical modeling, experiments, and interviews. Apart from her research skills, she has eight years of experience supervising projects in civil society and human rights organizations within the challenging context of contemporary Russia.

In collaboration with Emil Kamalov, she co-founded and co-leads two research projects:

1. OutRush: A panel survey of Russian emigrants, initiated as both a personal and professional response to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Since March 2022, more than 10,000 Russian emigrants, now located in more than a hundred countries, have participated in the survey. The project has garnered substantial international media coverage and has drawn the attention of policymakers and experts.
2. Violence Monitor: A national survey on intimate partner violence in Russia that integrates UN methodology with experimental techniques.
    

She is expected to receive her PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute in October 2024. She holds an MA in Sociology from the European University in Saint Petersburg.

Benjamin Yoel is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University. Previously, he was a Predoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University's SNF Agora Institute and a visiting PhD student at the University of Chicago's Center on Democracy.

Benjamin studies democratic backsliding, nonviolent resistance, international pressure, opposition politics, and public opinion. His main research agenda focuses on the nexus of foreign pressure and opposition to democratic backsliding. Other work focuses on the broader causes and consequences of democratic backsliding as well as making different types of data more accessible to researchers and practitioners alike. His academic work has been published in Nature: Scientific Data, The International Journal of Public Opinion Research, International Affairs, and American Politics Research.

In addition to his academic research, Benjamin has consulted on projects related to democratic backsliding that have been supported by the US Department of State's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Michigan State University and a B.A. and M.A. in Government from Reichman University.

Frances Cayton is a scholar of democracy and civil society. For the 2026-27 academic year, she is the Einstein Moos Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). In 2027, she will join the University of South Carolina as an Assistant Professor of Political Science.

Frances' book project, "How Civic Consciousness Shapes Democratic Resilience," examines how, why, and under what conditions civil society encourages individuals to depolarize and resist democratic erosion. Combining extensive organizational and bureaucratic data, elite and mass surveys, experiments, and interview evidence, she demonstrates how informal and apolitical subsets of civic life retain critical latent democratic potential. The project primarily focuses on Poland and Hungary, though it also draws comparisons with cases across East-Central Europe and globally.

More broadly, Frances works on questions about the drivers and consequences of democratic engagement, particularly concerning conspiracy theories, opposition media, and the challenges of post-backsliding redemocratization. Her research is published or forthcoming in numerous outlets, including the American Journal of Political Science and Perspectives on Politics. Her work has been supported by the US Departments of State and Education, as well as the American Political Science Association. She is also the co-founder of EEPGW, a monthly online workshop on East European politics.

Frances holds a Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University. She earned her AM from Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.  He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration.  He is codirector of the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and Social Science One, a project to make available to the world’s research community privacy-protected Facebook data to study the impact of social media on democracy.  He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.  Along with Professor Charles Stewart III, he recently founded HealthyElections.Org (the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project) which aims to support local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.   

James Goldgeier is a Research Affiliate at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and Professor Emeritus at the School of International Service at American University, where he served as Dean from 2011-17. From 2019-2025, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution. In 2018-19, he held the Library of Congress Chair in U.S.-Russia Relations at the John W. Kluge Center and was a visiting senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to joining American University, he was a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, where from 2001-05 he directed the Elliott School’s Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies. He also taught at Cornell University, and has held a number of public policy appointments and fellowships, including Director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian Affairs on the National Security Council Staff, Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Henry A. Kissinger Chair at the Library of Congress, and Edward Teller National Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Dr. Goldgeier has authored or edited six books, most recently Evaluating NATO Enlargement: From Cold War Victory to the Russia-Ukraine War (2023), co-edited with Joshua Shifrinson. He is the recipient of the Edgar S. Furniss book award in national and international security and co-recipient of the Georgetown University Lepgold Book Prize in international relations. Dr. Goldgeier is a senior adviser to the Bridging the Gap initiative, which promotes scholarly contributions to public debate and decision making on global challenges and U.S. foreign policy, and is co-editor of the Oxford University Press Bridging the Gap Book Series.

Dr. Goldgeier is past president of the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs (2015-2017). He received his M.A. and PhD in Political Science from the University of California Berkeley and his A.B., magna cum laude in Government, from Harvard University.