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. I research and teach on international security, catastrophic risks, and political psychology, for which I have won grants and awards.

Trained as a social scientist, my current research applies organizational and psychological approaches to safety-critical technologies (particularly nuclear weapons and AI) and the institutions that govern them. This work, also supported by 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. My recent writing on these topics appears here and here.

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. I am continuing this work at the Carnegie Endowment by investigating how Europe’s “frontline states” view the changing European nuclear landscape. 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.

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.