Chief Executive Officer

Christine Parthemore is Chief Executive Officer of the Council on Strategic Risks (CSR). She is also Director of CSR’s Janne E. Nolan Center on Strategic Weapons, and was a founding Board Member of CSR.

Her current work covers issues in countering weapons of mass destruction, arms control and disarmament, biosecurity and biodefense, innovation and technology trends in national security, and the security implications of a broad range of global risks. Christine was an adjunct professor in the Global Security Studies program at Johns Hopkins University from 2010 to 2020. In 2016 she was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow in Tokyo, where she researched Japan’s approach to international civil nuclear cooperation.

Prior, she served as the Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Defense Programs in the U.S. Department of Defense, an office that managed more than $3 billion per year in research and development, acquisition, treaty compliance, and international partnership programs in addition to directing the Nuclear Weapons Council. Her countering-weapons of mass destruction work spanned from projects to eliminate chemical weapons to biosecurity capacity-building programs with partner countries. It included a multi-year effort leading to the international mission to remove and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons, and collaboration with international partners on all-hazards emergency preparedness and global health security.

Christine has worked at various think tanks, including as a Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, where she worked on one of the first programs dedicated to analysis of the security implications of climate change. She has received multiple public service awards for her work in the U.S. government, contributed to two best-selling nonfiction books, testified before Congress, spoken at the United Nations, authored or coauthored dozens of written works, and lectured at universities in the United States, Vietnam, and China. She holds degrees from The Ohio State University and Georgetown.

Twitter handle: @clparthemore
Email: cparthemore (at) csrisks.org