Erik R. Peterson

Erik Peterson is senior vice president at CSIS, where he also serves as director of the Global Strategy Institute, a “think tank within a think tank” established in 2003 to assess long-range trends. He also holds the William A. Schreyer Chair in Global Analysis, an endowed chair named in honor of Merrill Lynch chairman emeritus William Schreyer. Prior to assuming his role as director of the Global Strategy Institute, Peterson was director of Studies at CSIS. In that capacity, from 1993 to 2002, he oversaw and coordinated programs, projects and publications across the organization. Before joining CSIS, he was director of research at Kissinger Associates, the international consulting firm chaired by former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger (a longstanding member of the CSIS Board of Trustees). Peterson serves on several advisory boards, including the X Prize Foundation, the Center for Global Business Studies at Pennsylvania State University, and the Center for the Study of the Presidency. He has also served as a fellow of the World Economic Forum and a member of the Forum’s Global Risk Network. In October 2008, he was appointed visiting scholar at the John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). For the past four years, he has served on the jury for the President Gerald R. Ford Foundation Journalism Prize Competition on National Security Reporting.

A sought-after public speaker represented by Leading Authorities, Peterson has addressed numerous groups in 48 U.S. states and 22 countries. He lectures regularly for a wide array of U.S. government institutions, including the Army Medical Strategic Leadership Program, Army War College, Coast Guard, Department of Agriculture, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of State, Interagency Institute for Federal Health Care Executives, Internal Revenue Service, Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Defense University, Proteus, Reserve Forces Policy Board, and U.S. Agency for International Development. The author of several publications, he is now completing a book on global strategic trends and their effects on governance structures in societies across the world. Together with Rachel Posner, he is author of Water and Energy Futures in an Urbanized Asia: Sustaining the Tiger (CSIS, 2007) and Global Water Futures: A Roadmap for Future U.S. Policy (CSIS, 2008). He also contributed a chapter entitled “Scanning the More Distant Future for the Common Good” in The Ethics of Leadership in the 21st Century (Praeger, 2006). Peterson received his M.B.A. from the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania, his M.A. from the Johns Hopkins University SAIS, and his B.A. from Colby College. He holds the Certificate of Eastern European Studies from the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) and the Certificate in International Legal Studies from The Hague Academy of International Law (The Netherlands).