Rebecca Patterson

Rebecca Patterson is a major in the U.S. Army and a Council on Foreign Relations International Fellow. She is currently working at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation on the development of the field of Expeditionary Economics. She will spend the second half of her fellowship in the Independent Evaluation Group at the World Bank.

Her previous military assignments include: Deputy, Director's Initiatives Group, Department of the Army Office of Business Transformation (2010), Staff Officer, Department of the Army Office of Institutional Adaptation (2009), economic advisor to the 1st Armored Division (MND-N) while deployed to Iraq (2008), command of an Army mechanized engineer unit in South Korea (2001-2003), platoon leader and executive officer at Fort Lewis, Washington where she supervised construction projects in Thailand (1997), Texas (1998) where she worked with Joint Task Force and the United States Border Patrol, and New York (1999) where she worked with the New York Police Department, the Corps of Engineers and the New York New Jersey High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area.

Ms. Patterson's academic background includes a BS in economics from the United States Military Academy, an MS in engineering management from the University of Missouri-Rolla and a PhD in national security policy from the George Washington University. Her dissertation is entitled, "The U.S. Army and Nation-building: Explaining Divergence in Effective Military Innovation." She also served as an assistant professor of economics in the Department of Social Sciences, U.S. Military Academy at West Point, NY (2006-2009) and as an adjunct professor at the George Washington University (2010-present).