http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/crbio.htm
Biography: Condoleezza Rice
President-elect George W. Bush selected Dr. Condoleezza Rice to be his National Security Advisor on December 17, 2000. She had been a Hoover Senior Fellow and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University before taking an academic leave of absence for a year during which time she conducted research and served as primary foreign policy advisor to the Bush Presidential Campaign.
She recently completed a six-year tenure as Stanford's Provost in June 1999, during which she was the institution's chief budget and academic officer. As Provost she was responsible for a $1.5 billion annual budget and the academic program involving 1,400 faculty members and 14,000 students. While Dr. Rice was instrumental in creating several new and innovative academic programs and initiatives, she also reduced $20 million in base budget costs of the university, balanced the budget in the first year, and reported budget surpluses during the rest of her tenure as Provost.
As a professor of political science, Dr. Rice joined the Stanford faculty in 1981 and won two of its highest teaching honors - the 1984 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 1993 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching. Her teaching and research interests included the politics of East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, the comparative study of military institutions, and international security policy. She pursued these specialties in academia and in government service.
At Stanford, she was a member of the Center for International Security and Arms Control, a Senior Fellow of the Institute for International Studies, and a Fellow (by courtesy) of the Hoover Institution. Her books include Germany Unified and Europe Transformed (1995) with Philip Zelikow, The Gorbachev Era (1986) with Alexander Dallin, and Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army (1984). She also has written numerous articles on Soviet and East European foreign and defense policy, and has addressed audiences in settings ranging from the U.S. Ambassador's Residence in Moscow to the Commonwealth Club to the 1992 Republican National Convention.
From 1989 through March 1991, the period of German reunification and the final days of the Soviet Union, she served in the Bush administration as Director, and then Senior Director, of Soviet and East European Affairs in the National Security Council, and as Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. In 1986, while an international affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, she served as Special Assistant to the Director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 1997, she served on the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender - Integrated Training in the Military.
She is a member of the boards of directors for the Chevron Corporation, the Charles Schwab Corporation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the University of Notre Dame, the International Advisory Council of J.P. Morgan and the San Francisco Symphony Board of Governors. She is a Founding Board Member of the Center for a New Generation, an educational support fund for schools in East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park, California and is Vice President of the Boys and Girls Club of the Peninsula. Her past board service has encompassed such organizations as Transamerica Corporation, Hewlett Packard, the Carnegie Corporation, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, The Rand Corporation, the National Council for Soviet and East European Studies, the Mid-Peninsula Urban Coalition and KQED, public broadcasting for San Francisco.
Born November 14, 1954 in Birmingham, Alabama, she earned her bachelor's degree in political science, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Denver in 1974; her master's from the University of Notre Dame in 1975; and her Ph.D. from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver in 1981. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been awarded honorary doctorates from Morehouse College in 1991, the University of Alabama in 1994, and the University of Notre Dame in 1995.
