Our Visiting Scholars

Yu Aoki

City University of New York

Yu Aoki completed his Ph.D. in Political Science in September 2022 at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Before coming to ISCS, he was both the Innovative Approaches to Grand Strategy Post-doctoral Fellow as well as a Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s International Security Center. His research interests are in international security and grand strategy with a focus on how states, especially the United States, assess adversaries’ and allies’ capabilities, intentions, and outlooks.

At ISCS, he will be working on his book project, entitled Policymakers, Intelligence Analysts, and Negativity Bias: How States Assess Strategic Situations. In his book project, he contends that a state’s policymakers and intelligence organizations tend to disagree, due to their varied susceptibility to what psychologists call “negativity bias,” on (1) how to infer their adversaries’ intentions from such adversaries’ past actions and (2) how to predict their adversaries’ and allies’ interpretations of their state’s backing down.

Ólafur Björnsson

University of Chicago

 Ólafur Björnsson is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago who specializes in International Relations. Ólafur’s primary research interests are Great Power Politics, International Security, and Strategic Studies, which he pursues with a strong emphasis on case studies drawn from European diplomatic and military history. Ólafur’s broader research interests include International Relations Theory, especially debates about World Order, Political Theory, and theories of Nationalism/State Formation.

Ólafur originally came to the University of Chicago as a Fulbright Scholar to obtain an MA degree in the Committee on International Relations. Before that, he studied Political Science and International Affairs at the University of Iceland, which included one semester spent as an Erasmus Scholar at the University of St Andrew Security Studies Program. In addition to being a Visiting Scholar at George Washington University’s Institute for Security and Conflict, Ólafur will be a Hans J. Morgenthau Predoctoral Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s International Security Center for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Zoltan Feher

Tufts Universit

Dr. Zoltán Fehér is a diplomat-scholar and a geostrategist with more than twenty years of experience working in government, academia, and the private sector on international relations, foreign policy, grand strategy, and geopolitical risk. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies (ISCS), Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University, and a Nonresident Fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub.

Previously, he served as a professional diplomat for Hungary for 12 years, working as foreign policy analyst at the Hungarian embassy in Washington DC, and as Hungary’s Deputy Ambassador and Acting Ambassador in Turkey. He has taught International Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Summer School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Tufts University, and leading Hungarian universities. He worked as an assistant to Joseph Nye at the Harvard Kennedy School.

He earned his PhD in International Relations from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, in 2023. His doctoral dissertation, The Sources of American Conduct: U.S. Strategy, China’s Rise, and International Order, focuses on the origins of U.S.-China strategic competition and examines the evolution of U.S. strategy toward China in the early post-Cold War period. He has served as an America in the World Consortium Predoctoral Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin, a Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow at the Notre Dame International Security Center at the University of Notre Dame, a Mason Fellow and a Ferenc A. Vali Scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a World Politics and Statecraft Fellow with the Smith Richardson Foundation.

To date, he has authored 5 journal articles and 4 chapters in edited volumes on international relations and international security. He has also published extensively in policy and scholarly publications, including Global Security Review, H-Diplo, The Duck of Minerva, New Atlanticist, The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, and several policy blogs. His policy commentary has been featured in various outlets, including War on the Rocks, This American Life, Czech State Television, Deutsche Welle, TVP World (Poland), Aljazeera, New York-based RTVi, Forbes Magazine, and The South China Morning Post.

He is also an Associate Research Fellow at the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs and a Nonresident Fellow at the John Lukacs Institute for Strategy and Politics at Ludovika University of Public Service – Hungary.

Lori Gronich

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.

Sunggun Park

I am a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at the George Washington University and currently in the final stage of my PhD at the University of Virginia. My research focuses on the impact of military strategy on foreign policy and the role of prestige and reputational concerns in international affairs. In my dissertation, I propose a strategic reputational theory that explains why great powers engage in peripheral conflicts often at the expense of their core national interests and test it with case studies. At George Washington, I teach for the Security Policy Studies MA program and also for the Department of Political Science. Prior to my doctoral research, I taught at South Korea’s Air Force Academy as an active duty officer. I hold an MA and a BA in Political Science from Korea University. 

Siu Hei Wong

University of Southern California

I am a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Political Science and International Relations of the University of Southern California and will be a predoctoral research fellow at George Washington University’s Institute for Security and Conflict Studies. My research focuses on the intersection between Political Communication and International Security, with a regional focus on Asia. My dissertation book project explores the strategic relationship between China’s official rhetoric and crisis response. My research is supported by the Charles Koch Foundation’s Dissertation Fellowship and Smith Richardson Foundation’s World Politics and StatecraM Fellowship.

Before that, I was a predoctoral research associate at Princeton University under the supervision of Professor Marc Ratkovic and Professor Noel Foster, a Wang Gungwu visiting fellow at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute (Singapore), and a predoctoral research fellow at Korean Studies Institute (KSI) in USC. My research has been presented in both think tank and academic conferences and received the Jimmy Carter Best Paper Award on U.S.-China rela4ons. Before my Ph.D. studies, I was a teaching associate at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. I received my undergraduate degree (University Distinction & Departmental Honors) in Political Science at the University of Michigan, and my master’s degree in International Relations at the University of Chicago.

Chris Ray

The Ohio State University

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.