Dr. Cindy Williams – MIT

Cindy Williams is a Principal Research Scientist of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work at MIT includes an examination of the processes by which the U.S. government plans for and allocates resources among the activities related to national security and international affairs and an examination of personnel policies in the armed forces of Western nations. Formerly she was an Assistant Director of the Congressional Budget Office, where she led the National Security Division in studies of budgetary and policy choices related to defense and international security. Dr. Williams has served as a director and in other capacities at the MITRE Corporation in Bedford, Massachusetts; as a member of the Senior Executive Service in the Directorate of Program Analysis of Evaluation of the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon; and as a mathematician at RAND in Santa Monica, California. Her areas of specialization include U.S. national security policies and budgets, military personnel policy, and command and control of military forces.

Dr. Williams holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Irvine. She has published in the areas of command and control and the defense budget. She is the editor of Holding the Line: U.S. Defense Alternatives for the Early 21st Century (MIT Press 2001) and Filling the Ranks: Transforming the U.S. Military Personnel System (MIT Press 2004). She is co-editor, with Curtis Gilroy, of Service to Country: Personnel Policy and the Transformation of Western Militaries (MIT Press 2006).