Cheryl Benard

Cheryl Benard (born in 1953) is an American-Austrian social scientist with a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna and a B.A. from the American University of Beirut. She is a novelist and an author on topics including popular sociology, refugees, women in nation-building, youth radicalization in the European Diaspora, and humanitarian aid. Before becoming an adjunct researcher with the RAND Corporation and President of ARCH International, she was the research director of a European think tank, the Boltzmann Institute of Politics and before that, she taught Political Science at the University of Vienna.She married Zalmay Khalilzad, a former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Afghanistan and Iraq.