Our Visiting Scholars

Alexis Dale-Huang is a PhD candidate at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs and a Visiting Scholar at George Washington University’s Institute for Security and Conflict Studies for the 2026–2027 academic year. Alexis’s dissertation project examines why states facing existential security threats vary in their ability to implement change in military strategy, operations, and capabilities, with a regional focus on East Asia. Her other academic research examines developments in Chinese foreign policy and military strategy. During her graduate studies, Alexis has served as a Graduate Fellow at the Princeton Center for International Security Studies and a 2025–2026 Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow at the O’Brien Notre Dame International Security Center. Alexis previously served as a policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, where she researched Chinese military affairs and U.S.-China relations. She has a BA from the University of Southern California, an MA in Asian Studies from Georgetown University, and an MA in Public Affairs from Princeton University. She is proficient in Mandarin Chinese.

Garrett Hinck is a PhD candidate in Political Science with a focus in International Relations at Columbia University and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at George Washington University. He studies the effects of technology on secrecy, signaling, and arms control, bridging Cold War nuclear competition to contemporary debates about emerging technologies and the future of strategic stability.

His dissertation, “Signaling Secrets: Strategic Intelligence, Technology, and the Sources and Methods Dilemma,” explores the conditions under which intelligence collection technologies can enable leaders to disclose covertly acquired knowledge about rivals’ capabilities, examining Cold War technical espionage and emerging technologies such as AI-enhanced ISR and space-based situational awareness.

He was an AIxNuclear Fellow at the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab and Council on Strategic Risks from 2025 to 2026, and a Hans J. Morgenthau pre-doctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame from 2024 to 2025. Previously, he worked at the RAND Corporation and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His work has been published in War on the Rocks, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Lawfare, the Journal of National Security Law and Policy, and the Washington Post, and by the RAND Corporation, the Council on Strategic Risks, and the UN Institute for Disarmament Research. He holds a B.S. from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.

Dr. Alex Finn Macartney is Associate Director of the FAO Regional Skill Sustainment Initiative and an Assistant Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He is a historian of radical politics and violence in Modern Japan and Modern Germany. His research and teaching specialties revolve around global and transnational history after 1945, with a particular focus on the international reaction to the US war in Vietnam.

Previously, Dr. Macartney was a visiting researcher at the Free University in Berlin and Waseda University in Tokyo. His most recent position was as a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer with the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University’s Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies. There, he taught the course “Race, Gender, and Empire in Japan and Germany, 1860 – the Present” and gave talks on the Red Army Factions in Japan and West Germany as well as anti-war GIs on foreign US bases in the Vietnam War.

His current book project, titled, Revolt Against Empire: Protest and Armed Resistance against the Vietnam War in Japan and West Germany, explores exchanges between anti-Vietnam War groups in Japan, West Germany, and the US in the 1960s and 1970s. The book focuses on the legacies of the fascist past, the transnational imagination of the 1960s, and use of political violence in both states. He has also published on the Japanese anti-imperialist movement in the Vietnam War era and protests against the Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s state visit to Europe in 1971.

Dr. Macartney received a B.A. from Lawrence University in 2010 and a Ph.D. in history from Georgetown University in 2019.

Christopher Ray is a Postdoctoral Fellow at ISCS, focusing on international security and political psychology. His book project, Enemy Unknown, examines how states respond to highly unprecedented emergent threats, particularly the ways that publics and policymakers manage uncertainty and anxiety. His other research examines public attitudes about threats like terrorism and great power conflict, the psychology behind climate change policy, and the strategic implications of mass trauma.

Christopher holds a PhD in Political Science from The Ohio State University, and an MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago. During the 2024-2025 academic year, he is engaged in a research project examining how top foreign policy graduate programs (including the Elliott School) train future policymakers to make decisions under uncertainty and threat.