2025
Ashley Rhoades
The RAND Corporation
Biography
Ashley Rhoades is a defense policy researcher at RAND, where she has led and worked on several studies for various Department of Defense sponsors. Her main areas of expertise are strategic competition, security cooperation, deterrence, force posture, and terrorism and counterterrorism. Geographically, she focuses on security issues within the European and Middle Eastern theaters. Her past professional experiences include working with the chief of staff of the Army’s Operation Iraqi Freedom Study Group at the National Defense University, as the editor-in-chief of the Georgetown Security Studies Review, as a research assistant at Stanford focusing on the Arab-Israeli conflict, as a litigation paralegal for a firm in DC, and as the director of North American operations for a United Nations-affiliated start-up. Rhoades received her M.A. in security studies from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She holds a B.A. with honors in political science and a minor in art history from Stanford University. She also spent two terms of her undergraduate studies at the University of Oxford, where she completed extensive research on a range of international security issues.