Elizabeth N. Saunders is Director of the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies and a Professor of Political Science at Columbia University.  Her research and teaching interests focus on the domestic politics of international security and U.S. foreign policy, including the presidency and foreign policy, and the politics of war.  Prior to joining Columbia, she was a Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.  She is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.  Her most recent book, The Insiders’ Game: How Elites Make War and Peace, was published by Princeton University Press in 2024 and won the 2025 Best Book Award from ISA’s Foreign Policy Analysis section. Her first book, Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions, was published in 2011 by Cornell University Press and won the 2012 Jervis-Schroeder Best Book Award from APSA’s International History and Politics section.  She has previously been a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations; a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; a postdoctoral fellow at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University; a Brookings Institution Research Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies; and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.  She holds an A.B. in physics and astronomy and astrophysics from Harvard College; an M.Phil. in international relations from the University of Cambridge; and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University.