Who We Are

The Institute's staff is made up of a diverse group of scholars, researchers, and students from various disciplines including political science, international relations, economics, and sociology.

Directors

Sue Peterson
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Sue Peterson is Wendy and Emery Reves Professor of Government and International Relations and Dean of Undergraduate Studies at the College of William and Mary. Her research interests include international conflict and cooperation, domestic institutions, U.S. foreign policy, and global health.

Michael Tierney
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Michael Tierney is Director of International Relations and Hylton Associate Professor of Government at the College of William and Mary. He received his PhD from UCSD in 2003. "His interests include international organizations, IR theory, political economy of development, the history and current state of the IR discipline and empirical research on multi-grained beverages."

Researchers

Mark Buntaine
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Mark Buntaine is a Ph.D. candidate at the Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment and a political scientist by training. His research interests focus on the intersection of international relations, development assistance, and the environment. With support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Mark leads a team of researchers who have coded every World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and African Development Bank project and country evaluation completed since 1990 on a set of environmental performance indicators. Prior to his doctoral studies, Mark worked on natural resource management, conservation and development projects in a variety of countries, including China, Thailand, Laos, Australia, and Ecuador.

Simone Dietrich
Research Associate
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Simone Dietrich is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. Her research interests include international development, comparative political economy, and global health. In her research on foreign aid she focuses on the determinants and effects of aid delivery mechanisms.

Darren Hawkins
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Darren Hawkins is a Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University, where he chairs the department. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1996. His work has appeared in International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, and Journal Politics, among other journals. His current research interests include Human Rights, International Institutions and Norms, and Latin America.

Cullen Hendrix
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Cullen Hendrix joined the Institute in 2011. He received his B.A. from Kalamazoo College and his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. His research interests include the economic and security implications of climate change, food security, and political violence. Along with Idean Salehyan, Cullen maintains the Social Conflict in Africa Database (www.scaddata.org), a Department of Defense-funded data project on social conflict in Africa. He has consulted for the World Food Programme and the Human Security Report Project and has research affiliations with the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the UT Austin.

Rob Hicks
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Rob Hicks is an Associate Professor of Economics at the College of William and Mary. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1997. He has published in the area of environmental economics, applied econometrics, and international development finance.

James Long
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James is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He received his BA in International Relations and History from William & Mary in 2003 and his MSc in African Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, in 2004. His research interests include voting behavior and electoral violence, democracy assistance, survey and field research methods, and international relations theory. He is a co-principal investigator on the TRIP project.

Daniel Maliniak
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Daniel Maliniak received his B.A. in Government and Economics from William and Mary in 2006 and is currently a graduate student in political science at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests include international relations theory and international political economy. He is a Principal Investigator on the TRIP project.

Christopher Marcoux
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Chris Marcoux is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the College of William and Mary. He is affiliated with the Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations and the Environmental Science and Policy Program. His research interests span international organization, international law, and the political economy of global environmental governance.

Daniel Nielson
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Daniel Nielson is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University. He received his PhD from the University of California, San Diego in 1997. His research interests include agency theory, multilateral development banks, social and environmental assistance, and comparative politics, particularly in Latin America.

Amy Oakes
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Professor Amy Oakes received her B.A. in Political Science from Davidson College and her Ph.D. in Political Science from The Ohio State University. Her research interests include the domestic causes of war and nuclear nonproliferation. Her work has appeared in Security Studies, Politics & Gender, International Journal, International Studies Quarterly, Foreign Policy, and edited volumes. She is currently working on a book manuscript that examines whether governments provoke international crises in response to domestic unrest, entitled Diversionary War. In 2009-2010, she was a research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Brad Parks
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Brad Parks is a Research Associate and Principal Investigator at the Institute and a PhD candidate at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He holds a BA in International Relations from the College of William and Mary and an MSc in Development Management from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Previously, Brad served as an Associate Director of Development Policy at the Millennium Challenge Corporation. He has written and contributed to several books and articles on international political economy, global environmental politics, and the allocation and efficacy of foreign assistance.

J. Timmons Roberts
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J. Timmons Roberts is a Professor of Sociology and the Director of the Center for Environmental Studies at Brown University. He directed the Environmental Science and Policy program at the College of William and Mary from 2001-2008, and is Visiting Research Associate in the ITPIR there. He received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1992. He has a wide range of interests related to environmental policy and environmental justice including work on the social impact of climate change and the role of foreign assistance in addressing climate justice demands.

Holger Schmidt
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Holger Schmidt is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University. Professor Schmidt's research and teaching interests include the prevention and management of violent conflict, the causes of civil and interstate wars, and quantitative methods. His current research focuses on developing a statistical model designed to forecast the severity of internal armed conflict in an effort to help improve both theory and practice in the areas of early warning and preventive intervention.

Stephen Shellman
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Stephen Shellman is a research associate for the AIDS and International Security Project. Steve earned his BA from the University of Georgia in 1997 and his MS and Ph.D. degrees from Florida State University in 2003. His research interests include internal conflict and cooperation and the relationship between political survival and the tactical choices both government and dissident leaders make during internal political struggles.

Dennis Smith
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Dennis Smith received his B.A. in Political Science from the University of Missouri-Columbia 1995 and his Ph.D. in Foreign Affairs from The University of Virginia in 2007. His research interests in the area of international security include: coercion, economic sanctions, regime change, and strategic studies. He is currently working on book manuscript that examines the effect of regime structure on a government's vulnerability to international overthrow attempts, entitled Overthrow: Domestic Structure and Vulnerability.

Maurits van der Veen
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Maurits van der Veen joined the department in 2010. He received his B.A. from Dartmouth College, an M.S. in computer science from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University. His research examines the various ways policy-makers think about ("frame") foreign policy issues, and the impact that different frames, in turn, have on actual policy choices. He has applied this approach to the study of foreign aid policy in Western Europe and the United States, the politics of European integration and EU enlargement, and the terminology used to describe massive human rights violations. He also develops agent-based computational models to analyze the impact of social networks on the spread of foreign policy frames, and of ideas more generally.

Staff

Ania Leska Baltes
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Budget and Administrative Manager
Ania Leska Baltes received her B.A. with honors in International Relations and German in 2001 from Bethany College. Her undergraduate thesis described the effect of Polish anti-German propaganda during the Cold War. She has also studied at the Pädagogische Hochschule in Heidelberg, Germany and the Goethe Institut in Munich. She attended graduate school at Louisiana State University where she studied International Relations and Comparative Politics, focusing her research on the International Court of Justice.

Robert Mosolgo
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Project Manager
Robert received his BA in East Asian Studies from the College of William and Mary in 2011. His research interests include aid allocation, emerging donors and incentives for reform in developing countries.

Brian O'Donnell
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Post-Baccalaureate Fellow
Brian earned his BA in Literary and Cultural Studies and Government from the College of William & Mary in 2011. His research interests include aid transparency, South-South cooperation, data visualization, and political theory.

Jim Deverick
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Director of Software Development and Information Technology
Jim earned his M.S., Computer Science from The College of William and Mary in 2002. He designs and implements technical solutions for all of the Institute's research divisions. He oversees a team of exceptional software engineering interns, and acts as the technical liaison between the participating university research teams and the software development teams at Development Gateway. He likes technology. A lot.