Stephanie Young is a senior political scientist at RAND, director of the Resource Management Program at RAND Project AIR FORCE, and a professor of policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. She manages a diverse portfolio of research in support of the Department of the Air Force on topics related to acquisition, logistics, industrial base, sustainment, installations/infrastructure, and organizational design. Her primary research interests relate to defense acquisition; budgeting; the planning, programming, budgeting, and execution system (PPBE); and broader resource allocation decisionmaking, but other recent work has focused on strategic competition, security cooperation and building partner capacity, countering-weapons of mass destruction, and U.S. policy in the Middle East and South Asia. In 2012 she spent three months as an analyst embedded with the Special Operations Joint Task Force–Afghanistan, in Kabul. At RAND she also taught a Ph.D. level course on the U.S. defense budget at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, and she previously served as the associate research department director of RAND's Defense and Political Sciences Department. She was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a Ph.D. in history and a B.A. in physics and astrophysics.
Selected Publications
Ben Connable, Stephanie Young, Stephanie Pezard, Andrew Radin, Raphael S. Cohen, Katya Migacheva, James Sladden, Russia's Hostile Measures Combating Russian Gray Zone Aggression Against NATO in the Contact, Blunt, and Surge Layers of Competition, (RR-2539), 2020
Stephanie Young, J. Michael Gilmore, Operating Under a Continuing Resolution A Limited Assessment of Effects on Defense Procurement Contract Awards, (RR-2263), 2019
Larson, Eric V., Derek Eaton, Michael E. Linick, John E. Peters, Agnes Gereben Schaefer, Keith Walters, Stephanie Young, H. G. Massey, and Michelle D. Ziegler, Defense Planning in a Time of Conflict: A Comparative Analysis of the 2001–2014 Quadrennial Defense Reviews, and Implications for the Army, RAND Corporation (RR-1309-A), 2018
Stephanie Young, Daniel Tremblay, Roland Yardley, The U.S. Department of Defense’s Earned Value Management-Analyst Workforce, RAND (RR-1254), 2016
Stephanie Young, Henry Willis, Melinda Moore, Jeffrey Engstrom, Measuring Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP) Performance: Capacities, Capabilities, and Sustainability Enablers for Biorisk Management and Biosurveillance, RAND (RR-660), 2014
Richard R. Brennan Jr., et. al., Ending the U.S. War in Iraq: the Final Transition, Operational Maneuver, and Disestablishment of United States Forces-Iraq, RAND (RR-232), 2013
Stephanie Young, ""Would Your Answers Spoil My Questions?": Art and Technology at the RAND Corporation," in Volker Janssen (ed.), Where Minds and Matters Meet: Technology in California and the West, University of California Press, 2012
National Defense Research Institute,, Sexual Orientation and U.S. Military Personnel Policy: An Update of RAND's 1993 Study, RAND Corporation (MG-1056-OSD), 2010