Carol R. Saivetz is a Senior Fellow in the MIT Security Studies Program. She is also an Associate of Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She holds and M.I.A., M.Phil., and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in Political Science and a certificate from what is now the Harriman Institute at Columbia. Between 1995-2005 she was the Executive Director of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and between 1992 and 2006 she was a Lecturer in Government at Harvard. She is currently teaching Russian Foreign Policy in the Political Science Department at MIT.
Professor Saivetz has consulted for the U.S. Government on topics ranging from energy politics in the Caspian and Black Sea regions, questions of stability in Central Asia, to Russian policy toward Iran. She is the author and contributing co-editor of 5 books and numerous articles and Soviet and now Russian foreign policy issues, including Russian policy toward the other Soviet successor states, the many facets of Russia's war against Ukraine, Russian policy toward Turkey, and current U.S.-Russian relations. She has also published opinion pieces on the Ukraine crisis, Russian intervention in Syria, and Russian approaches to the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh for the Lawfare Blog (Brookings) and commented on events in Russia, Syria and the Ukraine war for local radio and TV. She is the co-chair of the MIT seminar series, "Focus on Eurasia," sponsored by the MIT Security Studies Program, the Center for International Affairs, and MIT-Eurasia.