Kathryn Stoner is the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Satre Family Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). From 2017 to 2021, she served as FSI's Deputy Director. She is Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at Stanford and teaches in the Department of Political Science, the Program on International Relations, and the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy Program. She is also a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) at the Hoover Institution.

Prior to coming to Stanford in 2004, she was on the faculty at Princeton University for nine years, jointly appointed to the Department of Politics and the Princeton School for International and Public Affairs (formerly the Woodrow Wilson School). At Princeton, she received the Ralph O. Glendinning Preceptorship, awarded to outstanding junior faculty. She also served as a Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at McGill University. She has held fellowships at Harvard University as well as the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. 

In addition to many articles and book chapters on contemporary Russia, she is the author or co-editor of six books: Transitions to Democracy: A Comparative Perspective, written and edited with Michael A. McFaul (Johns Hopkins 2013);  Autocracy and Democracy in the Post-Communist World, co-edited with Valerie Bunce and Michael A. McFaul (Cambridge, 2010);  Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia (Cambridge, 2006); After the Collapse of Communism: Comparative Lessons of Transitions (Cambridge, 2004), coedited with Michael McFaul; and Local Heroes: The Political Economy of Russian Regional Governance (Princeton, 1997); and Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2021).

She received a BA (1988) and MA (1989) in Political Science from the University of Toronto, and a PhD in Government from Harvard University (1995). In 2016, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Ilia State University in Tbilisi, the Republic of Georgia.

Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.

Alan Isenberg is the anchor producer of CNN's The Situation Room, a daily show hosted by Wolf Blitzer on politics and international affairs. He was a fellow at CISAC from 2004-2005 and an affiliated scholar at CDDRL from 2002-2005. During his fellowship, he examined the sufficiency of the present institutional and legal frameworks dealing with nuclear nonproliferation, and explored ways to modernize these frameworks in accordance with today's security threats. In this context, he focused especially on the future of the U.S.-Iran strategic relationship. He came to Stanford in 2002 from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, where he was on staff in the International Security Program and focused his research on the transatlantic defense relationship and nuclear nonproliferation. He represented FSI and Stanford Law School on the Stanford International Law steering committee.

Isenberg wrote for Newsweek's domestic and international editions from 2005-2006. He was a contributing editor of the world affairs journal Orbis from July 2002 to January 2005, and has published widely in American and international newspapers, including the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal Europe, and the International Herald Tribune. He serves as a nonresident senior advisor to the Institute for Strategic Studies in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Isenberg holds a BA in diplomatic history (magna cum laude) from the University of Pennsylvania, and a JD from Stanford Law School, where he served as senior articles editor for the Stanford Journal of International Law.