Rebecca Lissner has served as the Principal Deputy National Security Advisor to the Vice President since May of 2022. Previously, served on the National Security Council Staff as the Acting Senior Director for Strategic Planning. In that role she served as the lead author of the Biden-Harris administration’s National Security Strategy and directed the Russia-Ukraine “Tiger Team” contingency planning process.

Previously, she has served as a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, a Special Adviser to the Deputy Secretary at the Department of Energy, and as a foreign policy adviser to the Harris, Biden, and Clinton campaigns. She has served as a non-resident scholar in Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program, along with research fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House, the Council on Foreign Relations, and International Security Studies at Yale University.

She earned an A.B. from Harvard University and an M.A. and PhD in Government from Georgetown University. She is the author of two recent books, Wars of Revelation and An Open World (with Mira Rapp-Hooper), and has published extensively on national security issues in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and War on the Rocks.