Elizabeth Wishnick, Ph.D.

Elizabeth Wishnick is an expert on Sino-Russian relations, People’s Republic of China and Russian security policy, Asian security, polar strategy, and resource security.

At CNA, Wishnick contributes her dual regional expertise on China and Russia, including professional proficiency in both languages, to research and analysis of Xi Jinping’s risk-taking, Sino-Russian military cooperation, PRC and Russian security policy, polar geopolitics, and resource security. She was part of a team that won CNA’s CEO Teamwork Award for Arctic research.

Wishnick is also a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute and was a tenured professor of political science at Montclair State University from 2005 to 2024. In 2024–25, she was a US-CARNet Fellow, a program to foster research collaboration between US and Central Asian scholars studying China. She received a RICE fellowship in 2023–24 from the East-West Center to direct a research project on US Indo-Pacific partners and the Arctic. She also received two Fulbright Awards and was a fellow at Harvard University, Stanford University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and Academia Sinica (Taiwan).

Wishnick received a doctorate in political science from Columbia University, a Master of Arts in Russian and East European studies from Yale University, and a Bachelor of Arts in political science from Barnard College.