Nonresident Scholars

Michael L. Collins has more than three decades of experience and leadership at the highest levels of the U.S. intelligence and national security community. He retired from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the top tier of its Senior Intelligence Service, capping a career of executive roles directing the full range of CIA and broader U.S. intelligence community responsibilities. His positions included acting chair of the National Intelligence Council, CIA chief strategy officer, deputy assistant director of the CIA for the East Asia and Pacific Mission Center, chief of staff to the CIA deputy director, and director of CIA analysis for regional and global portfolios. Mr. Collins directed some of the U.S. government’s most authoritative analyses while pioneering “net assessments” of the competitive balance across geopolitical, technological, economic, and intelligence domains. An intelligence enterprise integrator, he designed the CIA’s holistic strategy for major power competition—the CIA Strategic Playbook—embedding new frameworks for measuring performance, prioritizing key technologies, and strengthening intelligence diplomacy and partnerships. Mr. Collins is the founder and managing director of Advantigence LLC, where he advises clients on geopolitical risk; advanced applications of artificial intelligence and other technologies for investigative and foresight purposes; and intelligence-based sources of advantage and resilience in a contested global order. Mr. Collins is a recipient of the U.S. Presidential Rank Award, multiple CIA Director’s Awards, and the Director of National Intelligence Award. He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Union College and completed a master’s degree, along with additional graduate study, at George Washington University.

Sam Erkiletian is a Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Distinguished Scholar and a political scientist specializing in national security and international armed conflict. His current research examines civilian harm mitigation and response at the tactical level using evidence from Ukraine. He received his PhD in political science from University College London (UCL).

As a 2024–2025 American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow, he served in the office of Representative Jason Crow, where he advised on House Armed Services Committee matters, including the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act and U.S. policy toward the Russo-Ukrainian War. Previously, he supported civilian harm mitigation and response research for the Department of Defense Civilian Protection Center of Excellence.

His research examines the internal dynamics of armed organizations and how they affect conflict processes and outcomes. He is particularly interested in how military training, leadership, combat motivation, and norms shape military readiness and behavior during armed conflict. His work explores how military socialization and small-unit subcultures influence combatants’ attitudes and conduct at the tactical level. He employs mixed-method research designs and comparative case studies, with particular expertise in collecting and analyzing archival data. His broader interests include military history, especially the Second World War and Cold War conflicts.

Lori Helene Gronich focuses attention on issues of international peace and security, American foreign policy, decision-making processes, research design, and the dynamics of individual and group cognition.  She has taught at Haverford College, Rutgers University, Johns Hopkins University-SAIS, Georgetown University, George Washington University, and the National War College, and she has been a research fellow at Harvard University, Princeton University, the Brookings Institution, Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program, USC, and UCLA.  She has received numerous grants for her scholarship and innovative approaches to teaching.

Dr. Gronich has been a consultant to the International Peace Academy, the US Department of Defense, the US Department of State, the US Agency for International Development, the US Department of Commerce, the Rand Corporation, the Stockholm International Peace Institute North America, the US Institute of Peace, and the Academy for Educational Development. She has served as the Director of the Office of Education and the Successor Generations at The Atlantic Council of the United States, and as a Program Officer with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Committee on International Peace and Security at the Social Science Research Council.

Dr. Gronich is a recipient of the Best Faculty Paper Award from the Foreign Policy Analysis Section of the American Political Science Association, and she has been nominated for the Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award for the best paper presented at the American Political Science Association meetings. Among her most recent publications are “Expertise and Naïveté in Decision-Making: Theory, History, and the Trump Administration,” in the H-Diplo/International Security Studies Forum Policy Series, America and the World—2017 and Beyond, May 3, 2017, http://issforum.org/roundtables/policy/1-5AH-expertise; and “Psychology” (with Richard H. Immerman) in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations 3rd edition, eds. Michael Hogan and Frank Costigliola (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). She is currently at work on a monograph, Choosing Force or Diplomacy: The Cognitive Calculus Theory and Foreign Policy Decision-Making; and she is developing a study integrating prospect theory, domestic political coalitions, and foreign policy change.

Dr. Gronich has lectured widely in the US and internationally, and she has served as a reviewer for several professional journals and presses.  She has been member of the Advisory Board of the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy, Temple University, and the Honor Board of Women in International Security.  She received her BA in political science from UC Santa Barbara, and her MA and PhD in political science from UCLA.

Matthew Levinger is Professor of Practice of International Affairs, and Director of the National Security Studies Program, an executive education program serving the U.S. Department of Defense and other federal agencies. Before joining GW, he was Senior Program Officer at the United States Institute of Peace, where he developed and taught executive education programs on international conflict analysis and prevention for foreign policy professionals from the United States and overseas. From 2005 to 2007, Levinger was Founding Director of the Academy for Genocide Prevention at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Before moving to Washington, he was associate professor of History at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon; he has also taught at Stanford University. In 2003-2004, he was a William C. Foster Fellow at the U.S. Department of State.