Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar
Chairman since 2021, board member since 2014. Menlo Park, Calif.
Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar is the tenth president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an institution created by Andrew Carnegie in 1910 to advise policymakers, support diplomacy, and conduct independent research on international cooperation, conflict, and governance. A former justice of the Supreme Court of California, he has served three U.S. presidential administrations at the White House and in federal agencies. He was the Stanley Morrison Professor at Stanford University, where he held appointments in law, political science, and international affairs and led the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He has been a member of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board.
As director of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute, he oversaw the university’s major research centers and educational programs focused on governance and development, international security, health policy, climate change and food security, and contemporary Asia and Europe. Previously, he co-directed Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and led its Honors Program in International Security Studies. During nearly seven years on California’s highest court while continuing to teach at Stanford, he wrote opinions addressing separation of powers, policing and criminal justice, democracy, technology and privacy, international agreements, and climate and environmental law among other issues, and led the court system’s operations to better meet the needs of millions of limited English speakers.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cuéllar has published widely on problems in American public law and democracy as the United States became a global power, how fast-evolving technologies like artificial intelligence affect public institutions, and how political economy shapes the administrative systems designed to manage transnational challenges such as mass migration, illicit financial activity, and public health. In the first term of the Obama administration, he led the White House Domestic Policy Council’s teams working on civil and criminal justice, public health, immigration, and regulatory reform. He also co-chaired the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity and Excellence Commission, and earlier, co-chaired the Obama Biden Transition Immigration Working Group. He began his career at the U.S. Department of the Treasury in the second term of the Clinton administration.
Cuéllar serves on the boards of Inflection AI and Harvard University. Previously, he chaired the boards of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Social and Ethical Implications of Computing Research, and was a presidential appointee to the Council of the U.S. Administrative Conference. Born in Matamoros, Mexico, he grew up primarily in communities along the U.S.-Mexico border. He graduated from Harvard College and Yale Law School and received a PhD in political science from Stanford University. He and his wife, Judge Lucy Koh of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, have two children.
