Born in New York and raised in Boston, Jessica Stern received her Bachelors Degree in Chemistry from Barnard College, and went on to earn a Masters Degree in Chemical Engineering/Technology Policy from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D in Public Policy from Harvard University. She lived and worked in Moscow for a number of years, and is fluent in Russian.

Jessica Stern currently teaches at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University and is a former member of the staff of the National Security Council, where she ran the Nuclear Smuggling Interagency group as director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian affairs. Stern also has been a Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC and at the Belfer Center for Sciences and International Affairs at Harvard University. From 1994 to 1995, she worked on the National Security Council staff at the White House as the Director for Russian, Ukranian and Eurasian Affairs. Responsible for nuclear smuggling and fissile materials security, she led several interagency groups at the NSC, including the Nuclear Smuggling Group, which she established. She also helped to oversee the final stages of Project Sapphire, a secret operation to transfer over half a ton of highly enriched uranium from Kazakhstan to safe storage in the United States.

Stern is the author of numerous articles on nuclear and chemical weapons policy and terrorism, and she was the model for the Nicole Kidman character in The Peacemaker, a Dreamworks film about nuclear-weapons terrorism. She also consulted the filmmakers on the dangerous reality of nuclear weapons smuggling.