David Holloway is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, a professor of political science, and an FSI senior fellow. He was co-director of CISAC from 1991 to 1997, and director of FSI from 1998 to 2003. His research focuses on the international history of nuclear weapons, on science and technology in the Soviet Union, and on the relationship between international history and international relations theory. His book Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (Yale University Press, 1994) was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of the 11 best books of 1994, and it won the Vucinich and Shulman prizes of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. It has been translated into seven languages, most recently into Chinese. The Chinese translation is due to be published later in 2018. Holloway also wrote The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (1983) and co-authored The Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative: Technical, Political and Arms Control Assessment (1984). He has contributed to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Foreign Affairs, and other scholarly journals.

Since joining the Stanford faculty in 1986 -- first as a professor of political science and later (in 1996) as a professor of history as well -- Holloway has served as chair and co-chair of the International Relations Program (1989-1991), and as associate dean in the School of Humanities and Sciences (1997-1998). Before coming to Stanford, he taught at the University of Lancaster (1967-1970) and the University of Edinburgh (1970-1986). Born in Dublin, Ireland, he received his undergraduate degree in modern languages and literature, and his PhD in social and political sciences, both from Cambridge University.

Michael McFaul is the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in Political Science, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, all at Stanford University. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1995 and served as FSI Director from 2015 to 2025. He is also an international affairs analyst for MSNOW.

McFaul served for five years in the Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014).

McFaul has authored ten books and edited several others, including, most recently, Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder, as well as From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia, (a New York Times bestseller) Advancing Democracy Abroad: Why We Should, How We Can; and Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin.

He is a recipient of numerous awards, including an honorary PhD from Montana State University; the Order for Merits to Lithuania from President Gitanas Nausea of Lithuania; Order of Merit of Third Degree from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, and the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford University. In 2015, he was the Distinguished Mingde Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center at Peking University.

McFaul was born and raised in Montana. He received his B.A. in International Relations and Slavic Languages and his M.A. in Soviet and East European Studies from Stanford University in 1986. As a Rhodes Scholar, he completed his D. Phil. in International Relations at Oxford University in 1991. 

Gail Lapidus is a Senior Fellow Emerita at the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Lapidus is also Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and served as Chair of the Berkeley-Stanford Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies from 1985 to 1994. A specialist on Soviet society, politics and foreign policy, she has authored and edited a number of books on Soviet and post-Soviet affairs, including The New Russia: Troubled Transformation (Westview Press, 1995), From Union to Commonwealth: Nationalism and Separatism in the Soviet Republics, with Victor Zaslavsky and Philip Goldman (Cambridge University Press, 1992), The Soviet System in Crisis, with Alexander Dallin (Westview, 1992), and Women in Soviet Society (University of California Press, 1979). A graduate of Radcliffe College, she received her MA and PhD from Harvard University.

Lapidus is also the author of numerous articles and chapters, including "The War in Chechnya as a Paradigm of Russian State-Building Under Putin," Post-Soviet Affairs, March 2004; "Putin's War on Terrorism: Lessons From Chechnya," Post-Soviet Affairs, January-March 2002; "Accommodating Ethnic Differences in Post-Soviet Eurasia," in Crawford Young and Mark Beissinger, eds., Beyond State Crisis? Post-Colonial Africa and Post-Soviet Eurasia in Comparative Perspective; "Transforming the 'National Question': New Approaches to Nationalism, Federalism and Sovereignty," in Archie Brown, ed., The Demise of Marxism-Leninism in Russia (Palgrave, 2004); "Transforming Russia: American Policy in the 1990s," in Robert Lieber, ed., America Rules? Foreign Policy and American Primacy in the 21st Century (Prentice Hall, 2001); and "Reagan and the Russians: American Policy Toward the Soviet Union," with Alexander Dallin, in Kenneth Oye et al., eds., Eagle Resurgent? The Reagan Era in American Foreign Policy (Little, Brown, 1987).

Lapidus is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, as well as of several scholarly associations. She has held a variety of scholarly and administrative appointments, including president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, chair of the Social Science Research Council's Joint Committee on Soviet Studies, the Advisory Council of the Woodrow Wilson Center's Kennan Institute, the Committee on International Political Science of the American Political Science Association, and the board of Trustees of the World Affairs Council of Northern California. She has held research fellowships at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. A frequent visitor to the USSR and now to a number of successor states, Professor Lapidus is currently working on a book on the impact of the Soviet legacy on patterns of conflict in the post-Soviet states.