Kathryn Stoner is Director of the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies, the Deputy Director and Senior Research Scholar at CDDRL. Her research focuses on comparative state building and effective governance; political economy of developing countries; Russian domestic and international politics; and Canadian politics. Prior to coming to Stanford, she was on the faculty at Princeton University in the Politics Department and Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs. She also served as a Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at McGill University.

In addition to several articles on contemporary Russia, she is the author of "Local Heroes: The Political Economy of Russian Regional Governance" (Princeton, 1997) and "Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia" (Cambridge, 2006). She is also co-editor of "After the Collapse of Communism: Comparative Lessons of Transitions" (Cambridge, 2004). She received a BA and MA in Political Science from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University.