Photo: iLab/CSIS
WASHINGTON, April 22, 2025: The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) announced today that Dr. Elizabeth (Beth) Cameron and Dr. Stephanie Psaki have been appointed as non-resident senior advisers with the CSIS Global Health Policy Center.
Cameron and Psaki are global leaders in health security and biodefense with experience across academia, nonprofit organizations, and in government, including establishing global health security missions at the White House. Dr. Cameron is a professor of the practice and senior advisor to the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health. Dr. Psaki recently joined the Brown School of Public Health as a distinguished senior fellow and formerly served as special assistant to the president and the inaugural U.S. coordinator for global health security at the White House.
Both experts will also serve on the CSIS Bipartisan Alliance for Global Health Security, an esteemed group of members of Congress, senior leaders, and subject matter experts charged with advancing a concrete, forward-leaning agenda for U.S. global health security strategy. The Alliance delivers recommendations on global health security policy and programs to key decisionmakers in the U.S. Congress, the executive agencies, and nongovernmental organizations, under the leadership of co-chairs former Senator Richard Burr and former CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding.
“I am personally so grateful that Beth and Stephanie, remarkably dynamic, creative, and impactful leaders, have agreed to join CSIS as senior advisers. They are generous, dear friends, and we need their brilliance as we seek to forge a constructive, bipartisan path through this fraught, divided moment of high uncertainty in protecting Americans from future biothreats,” said J. Stephen Morrison, senior vice president and director of the CSIS Global Health Policy Center.
Cameron spent two tours on the White House National Security Council staff, twice helping establish and lead the Directorate on Global Health Security and Biodefense. In this role, she built and led a robust team focused on preventing, detecting, and rapidly responding to biological crises. She held senior posts at USAID and the Departments of State and Defense, where she oversaw biological and chemical security efforts. She was an architect of NTI | bio, a program of the Nuclear Threat Initiative aimed at countering biological catastrophes, and she served at the American Cancer Society.
She got her start in government as an American Association for the Advancement of Science fellow at the U.S. Department of State and in the office of Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Cameron holds a PhD in Biology from Johns Hopkins University and a BA in Biology from the University of Virginia (UVA). She is a practitioner senior fellow of the UVA Miller Center and a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
“I am thrilled to take on this role, with the inimitable CSIS team, at this fork in history,” said Cameron. “Amid rising biological risks and an increasingly unstable world, now is the time to double down on our shared mission to find solutions urgently to the toughest health security challenges of our time.”
Psaki is a public health leader with expertise at the intersection of national security, global health, and equity, and has held leadership positions across government, NGOs, and research institutions. In her most recent role at the White House, she oversaw the federal government’s response to emerging global health threats such as Mpox, Ebola, and Marburg. While on staff at the National Security Council, Psaki also coordinated U.S. government engagement on issues including ending HIV/AIDS as a public health threat, investing in health workers, expanding access to sexual and reproductive health services, and protecting human rights.
Psaki previously worked for 20 years at NGOs and research institutions, including Partners in Health, FHI 360, and the Population Council, where she led a research center focused on expanding opportunities for young people around the world. Psaki holds a PhD from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and an MS from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“In this moment of enormous challenge, it is more essential than ever that we create spaces for difficult but constructive conversations about how we will meet growing threats, including from outbreaks, climate change, and humanitarian crises. CSIS has long played that role, and I am honored to join as a senior adviser,” said Psaki.
CSIS’s Global Health Policy Center (GHPC) conducts analysis to raise bipartisan awareness and shape policy debate about global health and its importance to U.S. national security. To learn more and read recent analyses from the CSIS Bipartisan Alliance for Global Health Security and the CSIS Global Health Policy Center, visit here.
For media inquiries, please contact Sam Cestari at scestari@csis.org.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) is a bipartisan, nonprofit policy research organization dedicated to advancing practical ideas to address the world’s greatest challenges.