Washington, DC - The Carnegie Endowment announced today that Justice Mariano-Florentino "Tino" Cuéllar of the Supreme Court of California will become the next president of the Carnegie Endowment. Cuéllar will succeed William J. Burns, effective November 1.
“We are incredibly excited to welcome Tino Cuéllar as the new president of the Carnegie Endowment. Tino is an exceptional leader who brings a lifelong commitment to innovative policy ideas and an intellectual heft that will help us in our impactful work to build peace and prosperity. His stellar and varied career path embodies the strategic perspective and analytic incisiveness required for this important role to take on the numerous complex and intersecting challenges that are putting our international order at risk. Under Tino’s dynamic leadership, our superb Carnegie team will strive for still greater levels of achievement and impact,” said Carnegie Endowment board chair and former Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker.
“I am honored to join the team at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,” said Cuéllar. “Through some of the most consequential moments in history over more than a century, the Carnegie Endowment has provided decisionmakers shrewd, non-partisan policy ideas for advancing international cooperation on some of the world’s greatest challenges. It will be an honor for me to lead Carnegie’s engagement on the defining global issues of our time, including climate change, the impact of evolving technologies on governance and geopolitics, mass migration, and the potential for rising great power competition.”
“Tino’s quintessentially American immigrant story is a foundation upon which he has built a tremendous career in public service,” said Carnegie Endowment board member and former World Bank president Bob Zoellick. “From law, to policy, to rigorous academic research, Tino sets a new standard for excellence at every turn. I am delighted that he will guide the Carnegie Endowment into its next chapter.”
Cuéllar is an admired judge and renowned scholar known for his international perspective and intellectual reach. He was appointed to the Supreme Court of California in 2015 and has since decided a wide range of cases addressing, among other issues, climate change, separation of powers, international treaty obligations, criminal justice, and privacy and technology. During the Obama administration, he served as Special Assistant to the President for Justice and Regulatory Policy. In this capacity, he led the White House Domestic Policy Council’s work on civil and criminal justice, public health, and immigration, as well as its efforts to support repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy, development of the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, the federal responses to the H1N1 flu virus outbreak, and mitigation of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and food contamination emergencies (2009-2010). He also co-chaired the Immigration Policy Working Group for the Obama-Biden transition in 2008‒2009, co-chaired the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity and Excellence Commission in 2011-2013, and served as a presidential appointee to the Council of the U.S. Administrative Conference in 2010-2015.
Prior to being named to the California Supreme Court, Cuéllar was the Stanley Morrison Professor at Stanford Law School and Director of Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cuéllar taught at Stanford for more than two decades. His scholarly writings address, among other topics, domestic and international security, American public institutions, law and artificial intelligence, immigration, and public health law.
Cuéllar spent more than a decade (2004-2015) in leadership positions at the Freeman Spogli Institute, Stanford’s hub for policy-oriented international research. After serving as Director of its Honors Program in International Security, he became Co-Director of the Institute’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and ultimately served as Institute Director, overseeing programs on international security and cooperation, international development, contemporary Asia and Europe, global health, and food security and the environment. Under his leadership, the Institute grew its faculty; expanded its nuclear security program; increased support for research on climate, health, and governance; launched university-wide initiatives on cyber security and global poverty; and grew operations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
He established a partnership with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to improve the design and administration of refugee settlements in Africa and Southeast Asia.
Born in Matamoros, Mexico, he moved with his family to California at age fourteen and became a naturalized U.S. citizen at age twenty-one. He holds a BA from Harvard College, a JD from Yale Law School, and a PhD in political science from Stanford. He began his career at the U.S. Treasury Department working on anti-money laundering enforcement policy and measures to disrupt weapons trafficking, and he served as a judicial law clerk for the Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He is married to Judge Lucy H. Koh of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and resides in Northern California with his wife and two children.
Among his first initiatives at Carnegie will be to reopen a West Coast office, in Silicon Valley, that will further expand Carnegie’s global presence.
For more information, including photos of Tino, a longer biography, and the letter sent by Penny Pritzker following the announcement, please click here: https://carnegieendowment.org/about/our-president
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The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is a nonpartisan international affairs think tank with centers in Washington, D.C., Moscow, Beirut, Beijing, Brussels, and New Delhi. In an increasingly crowded, chaotic and contested world and marketplace of ideas, the Carnegie Endowment offers decisionmakers global, independent, and strategic insight and innovative ideas that advance international peace.
Contact:
Douglas Farrar
Acting Vice President, Communications and Strategy
douglas.farrar@ceip.org
Tel. 202.669.2333