I work on how catastrophic risks get governed and why that governance so often fails, with a focus on nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence.

I am currently a Stanton Foundation nuclear security fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Nuclear Policy Program, an assistant professor of international relations at Central European University, and a visiting professor at Bard NYC’s Master of Arts in Global Affairs program.

My current research applies organizational and psychological approaches to safety-critical technologies and the institutions that govern them. This work, supported by the Stanton Foundation and CIVICA, asks how organizations learn from accidents they cannot reconstruct, and how nuclear command and control can reduce risk as AI is integrated into it. A related thread, supported by EISA, examines how psychological distance shapes our capacity to reason about catastrophic risk.

These questions extend a longer engagement with the institutions of global risk. A Stanton Foundation-funded project on nuclear control in context examines the role of international institutions and security architecture in deterrence and escalation, with a focus on European nuclear deterrence. My book project widens this lens by examining how great powers have used grand bargains and spheres of influence to coordinate military interventions and cooperate on global problems over the last two centuries.

I write regularly for Foreign Policy and War on the Rocks, with recent pieces here and here. Before joining CEU, I was a 2018 postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta's China Institute, and a 2017/2018 research fellow at the Trudeau Centre for Peace, Conflict, and Justice at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. I hold a PhD in political science from the University of Toronto and hail from Nova Scotia, Canada.