As president-elect Barack Obama prepares to take office, his transition teams are drawing on several Stanford scholars to help shape the policies and ideas of his administration.

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar a professor of law, was tapped to head a working group on immigration policy. Cuellar worked in the Treasury Department under the Clinton administration and is an expert on how organizations manage complex regulatory, migration, international security and criminal justice problems.

Peter Henry, the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of International Economics, has been named leader of an economics team reviewing international lending agencies. And Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, a senior research scholar at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies' Center for International Security and Cooperation, sits on the national security review team focusing on the Department of Defense.

The review teams are responsible for making sure that senior appointees have the information they need to complete the confirmation process, lead their departments and begin implementing policy initiatives as soon as they are sworn in.

Political science Professor Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, also is assisting the Obama transition. McFaul was a chief adviser on Russia and Eurasia to Obama's campaign.