About

Elsa Ransom joined the SSRC in June 2007 and is now deputy director for the The Inter-American Foundation Research Fellowship Program. She received her BA in political science and Russian studies from UCLA and her MA in Russian and Central Asian studies from Harvard. She has lived in St. Petersburg, Russia as an English teacher and Tashkent, Uzbekistan as an intern for the US Embassy and then again as a graduate student conducting research on water resource management. Prior to joining the SSRC, Elsa worked at the Open Society Institute on a fellowship program that brought students from the former Soviet Union to the United States for graduate studies.