Eleni Ekmetsioglou

Eleni Ekmektsioglou is a Project Manager and Senior Fellow with the British American Security Information Council (BASIC). Her project looks at the impact of emerging technologies on Anti-Submarine Warfare and the future of the Undersea Nuclear Deterrent. Prior to this role, Eleni was an UC-IGCC Postdoctoral Fellow in Technology and International Security with the U.S. National Labs for Nuclear Weapons (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory). She completed her Ph.D. at American University’s School of International Service.

Her research looks at the reasons behind the variation in military organizations’ reactions to emerging technologies. Her dissertation sheds light on the determinants behind military organizations’ assessments and evaluations of emerging technologies. Given the potentially critical impact of new technologies on military effectiveness and systemic power balances, the dissertation argues that we need to understand deeper the determinants behind military organizations’ reactions to emerging technologies including cases such as adaptation, rejection and/or countering.

While a Ph.D. candidate, she completed a predoctoral fellowship at GWU’s Institute for Security and Conflict Studies (ISCS) while she is a member of a number of policy and academic networks such as SWAMOS, Bridging the Gap, and APSIA. Before she started her Ph.D., she worked for the European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) in Paris on a research project that looked at transatlantic cooperation in the Asia Pacific region. She was also a Handa Fellow at Pacific Forum CSIS in Honolulu doing research on China’s nuclear and naval strategy. She holds a master’s degree in international conflicts from the War Studies Department at King’s College London.

She is the co-founder of the Emerging Scholars on Emerging Technologies network and she has published both peer-reviewed articles and opinion pieces in journals such as the Pacific Review, the Strategic Studies Quarterly, the National Interest, and the Diplomat Magazine.