Elizabeth A. Stanley, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Security Studies in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Department of Government. Previously, she served as Associate Director of Georgetown's Security Studies Program and the Center for Peace and Security Studies. She served in Bosnia, Germany, Macedonia, Italy and Korea as a US Army military intelligence officer, leaving service with the rank of Captain.
Blending her military experience, research, and experience teaching mindfulness techniques, she created Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training (MMFT)™ to build warrior resilience and optimize individual and team performance. She taught MMFT (pronounced “M-fit”) in 2008 to a cohort of Marines before their deployment to Iraq as part of a pilot study with neuroscientist Amishi Jha (University of Pennsylvania), to examine the neurobehavioral effects of this training. Stanley and Jha are now conducting a multi-year DoD-funded study to evaluate the efficacy of different versions of MMFT during the pre-deployment period versus another resilience training program. Stanley has taught mindfulness workshops to the military with Jon Kabat-Zinn, the creator of Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction. She has extensive practice with mind fitness techniques, including longer-term retreats in the US and Burma (Myanmar), and she has training in somatic-based trauma therapies.
Stanley is a member of the National Security Advisory Board of the Sandia National Laboratories, and she has served on the US Army Science Board and the executive board of Women in International Security (WIIS). She was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard’s Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the G.D. Searle Foundation, the John Kluge Foundation, the Department of Defense Centers for Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, and Sandia National Laboratories.