Spotlight: November - Condoleezza Rice

Condoleezza Rice

Happy Birthday....Condoleezza Rice:  Born, November 14, 1954 in Birmingham, Alabama, is an American political scientist, professor and diplomat. 

• She served as the 66th United States Secretary of State, and was the second person to hold that office in the administration of President George W. Bush. Rice was the first female African-American secretary of state
• Second African American, after Colin Powell, and the second woman, after Madeleine Albright. 
• President Bush's National Security Advisor during his first term, making her the first woman to serve in that position.
• Professor of political science at Stanford University where she served as Provost from 1993 to 1999.
• Served on the National Security Council as the Soviet and Eastern Europe Affairs Advisor to President George H.W. Bush during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and German reunification.
• Pioneered the policy of Transformational Diplomacy, with a focus on democracy in the Greater Middle East. Her emphasis on supporting democratically elected governments faced challenges as Hamas captured a popular majority in Palestinian elections, and influential countries including Saudi Arabia and Egypt maintained authoritarian systems with U.S. support. 
• While Secretary of State, she chaired the Millennium Challenge Corporation's board of directors.
•  Rice returned to Stanford University in March, 2009, as a political science professor and the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution.  In September 2010, Rice became a faculty member of the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a director of its Global Center for Business and the Economy.
• She accompanied cellist Yo-Yo Ma playing Brahms's Violin Sonata in D Minor at Constitution Hall in April 2002 for the National Medal of Arts Awards.
• On August 20, 2012, it was announced that Rice was one of the first two women to be admitted as the first two women to be admitted as members to Augusta National Golf Club, the other being South Carolina financier Darla Moore.
•  In 1974, at age 19, Rice was inducted into the honor society Phi Beta Kappa, and was awarded a B.A., cum laude, in political science by the University of Denver. While at the University of Denver she was a member of Alpha Chi Omega, Gamma Delta chapter. She obtained a master's degree in political science from the University of Notre Dame in 1975. She first worked in the State Department in 1977, during the Carter administration, as an intern in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. In 1981, at the age of 26, she received her Ph.D. in political science from the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. Her dissertation centered on military policy and politics in what was then the communist state of Czechoslovakia
• She has never married and has no children.