Jessica T. Mathews is president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an international research organization founded in 1910, with offices in Washington, D.C. and Moscow. Her career includes posts in the executive and legislative branches of government, in management and research in the non-profit arena, and in journalism.

She was a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1993 to 1997 and served as director of the Council's Washington program. While there, she published her seminal 1997 Foreign Affairs article, "Power Shift," chosen by the editors as one of the most influential in the journal's 75 years. From 1982 to 1993, she was founding vice president and director of research of the World Resources Institute, an internationally known center for policy research on environmental and natural resource management issues. She served on the editorial board of The Washington Post from 1980 to 1982, covering energy, environment, science, technology, arms control, health and other issues. Later, she became a weekly columnist for The Washington Post, writing a column that appeared nationwide and in the International Herald Tribune. From 1977 to 1979, she was director of the Office of Global Issues of the National Security Council, covering nuclear proliferation, conventional arms sales policy, chemical and biological warfare, and human rights. In 1993, she returned to government as deputy to the Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs. She has also written for The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, and other scientific and foreign policy journals. She co-edited The Earth as Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere Over the Past 300 Years and co-authored and edited Preserving the Global Environment: The Challenge of Shared Leadership.

Dr. Mathews is a director of Somalogic Inc.; and a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation; The Century Foundation; and the Nuclear Threat Initiative. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the International Advisory Board of the Center for International Development at Harvard University. She has previously served on the boards of the Brookings Institution, Radcliffe College, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Joyce Foundation among others.

Dr. Mathews graduated magna cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1967 and received a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the California Institute of Technology in 1973.