Yale Alumni LIVE: Yalies at West Point

Cadet Isabelle Embola is a current International History and Arabic double major at the United States Military Academy. She spent the first semester of her junior year studying abroad in Rabat, Morocco. Isabelle enlisted in the Army as a Cryptological Linguist prior to her to her acceptance to USMA and completed the Basic Modern Standard Arabic Course as well as the Egyptian Dialect Conversion Course at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA. After graduation, Isabelle will commission as an Armor officer, transitioning back to the Military Intelligence community after a few years.

Lieutenant Colonel Charles Faint currently serves at the Deputy Director of the Modern War Institute at West Point.  He is a 2013 graduate of Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, and is currently pursuing his Doctorate of Business Administration at Temple University.  Charlie served seven combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with the 5th Special Forces Group, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and the Joint Special Operations Command.  He is a founding member of the Peace and Dialogue Leadership Initiative (a joint Yale/West Point Fellowship program), and is the Executive Director of the non-profit Second Mission Foundation.

Colonel Rich Morales, PhD, leads the Department of Systems Engineering at West Point. He holds a BS from West Point, Yale MBA (Donaldson Fellow), MA from the Naval War College, MS from the National Defense University, and a PhD in Engineering from Cambridge University. He led a Gulf War tank platoon, UN peacekeeping force, battalion responsible for 1/3 of Baghdad, and a Cadet Command Brigade. He is a multi-tour combat veteran and recipient of the Purple Heart. He is an Army Strategist, White House Fellow, former aide to the head of NASA, and led a national initiative in the Executive Office of the President.

Dr. Robert Person is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the United States Military Academy, where he directs West Point’s curriculum in International Affairs.  He earned a PhD in Political Science from Yale University and is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a resident fellow at West Point’s Modern War Institute.  Dr. Person is currently writing a book on Russian grand strategy in the 21st century, forthcoming from the Brookings Press.  You can find him cooking the food of Russia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus on Twitter @RTPerson3. 

Dr. Rachel Milstein Sondheimer is the Vice Dean for Academic Affairs at the United States Military Academy in West Point, NY. Dr. Sondheimer earned her Ph.D. in political science from Yale University in 2006 after earning her B.A. in government from Dartmouth College in 2001. She began teaching in the American Politics program in the Department of Social Sciences at USMA in 2007. Dr. Sondheimer served as the Director of the American Politics program from 2013 through 2015. She is the co-author of the 7th edition of American National Security and has published in various journals, including the American Journal of Political Science and Armed Forces and Society. 

Captain Hannah M. Smith is an Instructor of International Affairs in the Department of Social Sciences at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Hannah graduated from West Point in 2012 and commissioned as a Military Intelligence Officer. She has served in the 82nd Airborne Division, 25th Infantry Division, and as an intelligence augmentee in the 75th Ranger Regiment. Hannah has deployed to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, and to Iraq in support of Operation Inherent Resolve. She holds a B.S. in Economics from the United States Military Academy, and an M.A. in Global Affairs from the Jackson Institute at Yale University where she was a research fellow for John Kerry and focused on U.S-Russia relations and grand strategy.