Rate My Professor Rebecca Patterson

Rebecca D. Patterson is Professor of the Practice of International Affairs and Director of the Center for Security Studies and the Security Studies Program in Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. A retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel who served 22 years as an engineer officer, she graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point with a B.S. and held command positions including, at age 22, leading a multinational unit of 18 Americans and 12 Thai soldiers during the Cobra Gold exercise in Thailand to build a daycare center adjacent to an elementary school. She was the sole female commander in her South Korea brigade near the demilitarized zone and later served in Afghanistan in General John Allen's Commander's Initiatives Group, focusing on coalition warfare, strategy-policy intersections, and civil-military relations.

Patterson earned an M.S. in Engineering Management from Missouri University of Science and Technology and a Ph.D. in National Security Policy from George Washington University. Her career includes roles as an economist in the World Bank's Independent Evaluation Group, Deputy Director of the Office of Peace Operations, Sanctions, and Counterterrorism at the U.S. Department of State, and Associate Professor at the National Defense University. She joined Georgetown in fall 2018 as Associate Director and Professor of the Practice before assuming her current directorship. She teaches Military Operations and Grand Strategy, Political Economy, and Peacekeeping. Her research interests encompass civil-military relations, nation-building, peacekeeping, and post-conflict economics. Notable publications are The Challenge of Nation-Building: Implementing Effective Innovation in the U.S. Army from World War II to the Iraq War (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014) and co-authored Winning Without Fighting: Irregular Warfare and Strategic Competition in the 21st Century (Cambria Press, 2024). A life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, she moderates public events and serves on the advisory board of the Georgetown Security Studies Review.