Amy Zegart

Biography provided by participant

Amy Zegart is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at UCLA's School of Public Affairs, where she teaches courses on U.S. intelligence agencies, national security policy, global studies, public management, and anything scary. She is also a fellow at UCLA�s Burkle Center on International Relations and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. She has been featured by The National Journal as one of the ten most influential experts in intelligence reform. She worked on the Clinton Administration's National Security Council staff in 1993 and served as a foreign policy adviser to the Bush-Cheney 2000 presidential campaign. Her first book, Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS and NSC (Stanford Univ. Press) received a prestigious political science dissertation prize, which means it was read by dozens. Her new book, Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 (Princeton Univ. Press, 2007), examines why intelligence agencies adapted poorly to terrorism before 9/11 and won the 2008 Louis Brownlow Book Award. A proud native of Kentucky, she received an A.B. in East Asian Studies from Harvard and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford. When not combating her own household insurgency of three kids, she hikes and watches bad reality television.