Postdoc Conference Considers How Policymakers Will Tackle the Risks of Tomorrow
On April 22 in Washington, D.C., IGCC hosted the annual end-of-year conference of the 2025–26 Postdoctoral Fellowship in Technology and International Security. The conference is the program’s culminating event and features presentations from fellows before an audience of leading scholars and national security practitioners.
Sarah Bidgood kicked things off with a presentation examining how leaders’ beliefs shape whether nuclear crises lead to arms control efforts or strengthened deterrence. Sarah’s research challenges the conventional wisdom, widespread within the nuclear policy field, that Cold War crises that brought countries to the brink of nuclear war motivated leaders to pursue arms control by making real the dangers of nuclear weapons. She finds that it leaders’ preexisting belief in the value of arms control and desire to prevent nuclear war that drives leaders to pursue policies of restraint.
Dominic Brennan explored the governance challenges involved in, and strategic importance of, integrating artificial intelligence into nuclear energy systems, offering policy and industry recommendations to ensure safe, secure, and competitive development. Dominic’s research provides a taxonomy of decision-making stages—problem definition, decomposition, simulation, algorithm choice, and final solution—that help to identify where algorithmic decisions can introduce or mitigate nuclear risks.
Jung Jae Kwon went next, assessing whether a nuclear-armed South Korea could achieve a stable balance with North Korea. South Korea is surrounded by three nuclear powers—North Korea, China, and Russia—and amid questions about the strength of the U.S. security alliance, the issue of nuclear weapons looms large. Jung Jae argued that despite some elements of deterrence stability, a nuclear-armed South Korea would perpetuate crisis dynamics and conventional-nuclear entanglement that would likely make the relationship fragile and potentially destabilizing.
Following lunch, Adi Rao introduced a method using directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to improve forecasting of rare international events by integrating findings from multiple studies into a unified causal framework. Forecasting is an important part of what intelligence agencies do and yet research shows that international relations experts often perform poorly when predicting geopolitical events. Adi’s framework provides a procedure for translating knowledge into forecasts that give decisionmakers the data they need to plan and react.
Eunji Emily Kim examined how federal legislation related to artificial intelligence (AI) shapes state-level policymaking by serving as a template for legislative language. This in turn can drive rapid convergence from state to state regardless of partisan alignment. Emily’s research underscores the importance of governance and policy to ensure that AI develops within parameters that reflect public values.
Colleen Larkin finished the day by examining how dominant narratives among U.S. national security elites shaped the development and persistence of nuclear strategy, reinforcing enduring tensions between deterrence, warfighting, and strategic superiority.
This was the final year of the fellowship for Colleen Larkin and Sarah Bidgood. In the fall, Larkin will join the London School of Economics as a tenure-track assistant professor and Bidgood will join the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech University as a tenure-track assistant professor. Bidgood joins other IGCC postdoc alumni including Juljan Krause and Harry Oppenheimer.
The conference was hosted by Neil Narang, IGCC co-director and director of the postdoctoral program. Participants included Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Director Kim Budil; Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Thom Mason; June Yu, Vice President for the UC National Laboratories Office; and other senior leaders from the national laboratories.
A distinguished group of discussants provided feedback to the fellows, including Rian Barham, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Reactors in the Office of Nuclear Energy; Bruce Desmarais, Professor of Political Science at Penn State; Marie Jones, Senior International and Defense Researcher at RAND; Keir Lieber, Professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and Department of Government; Pranay Vaddi, National Security Policy at Sandia National Laboratory; and Jane Vaynman, Assistant Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS.
The conference capped a successful fifth year of the fellowship. IGCC will welcome a new cohort for the 2026–27 academic year, including Cheyenne Black (University of Oklahoma) and Beenish Pervaiz (MIT Security Studies Program), both of whom attended this year’s conference.
Stay tuned for more from IGCC’s current and future fellows.