2019 Nuclear History Boot Camp Participants

Announcing the 2019 Nuclear Boot Camp Participants

The 2019 Nuclear History Boot Camp will be hosted by the University of Roma Tre for ten days in May-June 2019. Aimed at building a new generation of experts on the international history of nuclear weapons, the ninth-annual Nuclear History Boot Camp is an initiative of the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project (NPIHP) and funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

This Year's Students

Leyatt Betre is a PhD candidate in Security Studies at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where she is affiliated with the Program on Science and Global Security. Her dissertation examines the work of technical communities engaged in weapons research and development in the United States and the Soviet Union in the decades leading up to and spanning the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. She is especially interested in understanding how actors in this space perceived, contested, and managed uncertainty about the future, and the resulting ways in which authoritative representations of the future restructured contemporary attitudes toward particular proposals for weapons programs and arms control. Prior to entering graduate school, Leyatt received her SB degree in Physics and Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she previously conducted research in both the Security Studies Program and the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

Tomisha Bino is a researcher with the department for Conflict Analysis and International Crisis Management at the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University (ISPK), where she researches stabilization interventions conceptually, as well as empirically, using MINUSMA as a case study.  She is also a former Academy Asfari fellow with Chatham House and was hosted at the International Security Department, where her research looked at the prospects of establishing a WMD-Free Zone in the Middle East. Bino is also a member of Middle East Next Generation of Arms Control Specialists (MENACS) Network, which focuses on promoting the work of young professionals from the region in the field of arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament. Bino is currently also preparing for her PhD thesis, where she will examine the sources of national security policy formulation in Jordan using elite network analysis.

Syed Adnan Athar Bukhari is working as Lecturer, International Relations at Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan, Pakistan. He is pursuing PhD at the Department of Defence and Strategic Studies (DSS), Quaid-i-Azam University (QAU), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is currently a visiting PhD Candidate at the School of History, Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester, UK under Split-PhD scholarship. Previously, he served as teaching assistant at DSS Department, QAU, Islamabad and as research analyst at South Asian Strategic Stability Institute, Islamabad. He holds M.Phil. in International Relations and MSc. in Defence and Strategic Studies from QAU, Islamabad. He has published five research papers, a book chapter, a research monograph, and couple of articles in different newspapers and online blogs/websites. His research areas include nuclear proliferation, non-proliferation, nuclear deterrence and strategy, South Asian security and politics, arms control and disarmament, contemporary international politics and security and foreign policy analysis.

Rishika Chauhan is an Associate Fellow at the Indian Pugwash Society. She recently submitted her PhD thesis to the Centre for International Politics, Organization and Disarmament at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She is also a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for India Studies in China West Normal University, China. She has held teaching and research positions at the University of Delhi and the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, and worked as a consultant for Boston University, USA. Rishika’s research interests include nuclear history, international sanctions and international relations theory. Her articles have appeared in Foreign Policy, The National Interest, and the Routledge Handbook of Asia in World Politics, among others.

AustinRory Cooper is a PhD student in History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation takes the history of nuclear testing in the Sahara Desert as a lens on decolonization in Algeria. His research focuses on interactions between science and politics in the colonial context, especially in modern North Africa. Austin completed his undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Naomi Egel is a PhD candidate in the Department of Government at Cornell University. Her dissertation examines why states pursue multilateral agreements to regulate weapons, and how the goals of different states affect the design of agreements. In doing so, she compares initiatives to regulate nuclear weapons to initiatives aimed at regulating other types of weapons. Her research interests focus on how actors use international institutions to advance different goals. She was formerly a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations. She has a BA in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and an MA in Government from Cornell University.

Florian Galleri is a PhD student in History at the University of Nantes (France) and focuses on the European dimension of French nuclear deterrence in the post-Cold War era. Previously, he received a master’s degree from the Sorbonne in Paris as well as a joint degree from the Sorbonne and Leeds University. His master theses dealt with the French and British interpretation of Soviet military doctrine (1956-62), and with French nuclear deterrence after the Cold War, respectively. His research interests include strategic studies, military and diplomatic policies and he has carried out research in several archives in France and the UK. Furthermore, he conducted a series of interviews with military officials and politicians.

Hannah Holtzman earned a PhD in French and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of French and Rhetoric at Hampden-Sydney College. Her research focuses on French nuclear culture and Franco-Japanese cultural exchange around nuclear concerns.

Matt Korda is a Research Associate for the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, where he co-authors the Nuclear Notebook with Hans Kristensen. Previously, he worked for the Arms Control, Disarmament, and WMD Non-Proliferation Centre at NATO HQ in Brussels. He received his MA in International Peace & Security from the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, where he subsequently worked as a Research Assistant on nuclear deterrence and strategic stability. He also completed an internship with the Verification, Training and Information Centre (VERTIC) in London, where he focused on nuclear security and safeguards. Matt’s research interests and recent publications focus on nuclear deterrence, missile proliferation, gender mainstreaming, and alliance management, with regional concentrations on Russia and the Korean Peninsula. He is a 2018 alumnus of IGCC’s Public Policy and Nuclear Threats Bootcamp and a 2019 CSIS Nuclear Scholar.

Mina Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of history at the University of Virginia. She holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in history from Korea University. Mina’s research interests include intersections between the Cold War and nation-building in East Asian countries in capitalist bloc, evolution of national security regimes, nuclear history, and making of knowledge and technology. Her current research project analyzes the South Korean government’s failed negotiations (1974-1976) to acquire nuclear reprocessing facilities from European countries and the role of the scientists who led Ministry of Science and Technology in the process.

Lukas Mengelkamp received his B.A. and M.A. in history from the University of Bonn. He is currently preparing his dissertation project on the criticism of deterrence theory and practice by German peace researchers during the Cold War. It aims at contextualizing the criticism of deterrence in the political, social and cultural history of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. His research interests include the History of the Cold War, Nuclear History and the History of Science.

J. Luis Rodriguez is a PhD Candidate in the Political Science Department at Johns Hopkins University, majoring in International Relations. He received his BA in International Relations from El Colegio de Mexico and an MA in Political Science from Hopkins. His research examines developing countries’ roles in the design of solutions to global problems through a mix of qualitative methods. He compares the roles of Latin American countries during the planning and implementation of multilateral norms to address nuclear, humanitarian, and environmental crises; he focuses primarily on the actions of Brazilian, Chilean, and Mexican diplomats. Before joining the PhD program at Hopkins, Luis Rodriguez was a junior advisor to the Mexican Vice-Minister for Latin American Affairs, where he observed firsthand how these countries confront global crises.

Lauren Sukin is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. She studies international security, with a particular focus on nuclear policy. Her dissertation examines the enforcement of the nuclear nonproliferation regime. Her other projects include research on: public opinion on nuclear acquisition and use, the role of nuclear weapons in deterrent and compellent threats, nuclear hedging in East Asia and the Middle East, and North Korean strategic responses to South Korean joint military exercises. She earned her undergraduate degrees in political science and literary arts from Brown University.

Océane Tranchez is a PhD student in political science and her research subject is French nuclear diplomacy. She worked at IESD, a French research center specializing in strategic and defense studies in Lyon. Her main "nuclear" interests are the Franco-British nuclear cooperation, the CTBT and the JCPOA.

Ben Wealer is a research associate at the Workgroup for Economic and Infrastructure Policy (WIP) at Berlin Institute of Technology (TU Berlin), and guest researcher at DIW Berlin (German Institute for Economic Research). He holds a MSc in industrial engineering in the discipline of energy and resource management from TU Berlin. His field of research is nuclear power economics with a focus on organizational models for decommissioning of nuclear power plants and radioactive waste management, economics of nuclear power plant new build, and the dual-use issues of nuclear power. He is a founding member of a research project on nuclear energy in Germany, Europe, and abroad run jointly by TU Berlin and DIW Berlin and he is the author—among others—of the first German independent decommissioning monitoring survey. Since 2018, Ben Wealer is also contributing author to the World Nuclear Industry Status Report.