Main focus: Defense and Security
Twitter handle: @amyjnelsonphd
Website/blog: https://sites.google.com/view/ajnelson1
Languages: German, English, French
City: Berlin
Country: Germany
Topics: foreign policy, decision-making, emerging weapons technologies, international negotiations, trade, arms control and nonproliferation, defense, defense and security, digitization
Dr. Amy J. Nelson is currently a Robert Bosch Fellow in residence at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) in Berlin, Germany exploring the current state of German military innovation and prospects for U.S.-German competition and cooperation in this area. She is also a Research Scholar at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland.
Nelson's areas of expertise include arms control, emerging weapons technologies, the defense trade, negotiation under uncertainty, and nuclear security. She was previously a Nonresident Fellow at the Stimson Center, a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a policy analyst in the State Department's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, Directorate of Defense Trade Controls in Washington, D.C. Nelson held pre-doctoral fellowships at the Stimson Center and SIPRI North America, and conducted dissertation research as a member of the U.S. arms control delegation to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which maintains the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty.
Nelson is currently working on a book on next generation arms control. Drawing on recent findings from the decision sciences, the book presents a new theory of arms control as a tool of uncertainty management. The book also uses the analysis of a novel dataset to incorporate empirically derived best practices into the negotiation of arms control agreement to overcome the effects of uncertainty. Finally, using the dataset, the book tracks trends in arms control over time, and provides analysis of recent events and developments in weapons technology to assess the current state of arms control and its likely future.
Nelson's writings have appeared in Foreign Affairs, the National Interest, the Washington Post, War on the Rocks, the International Business Times, the Millennium Journal of International Studies, Political Psychology and the Journal of Neurophysiology. She received her A.B. in Philosophy with honors from Stanford University, has an M.A. in Intellectual History from Columbia University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.