Rachel is a first-year PhD candidate in the Woodrow Wilson School. Raised in Virginia Beach, she received a Bachelor in Commerce from McGill University in 2006 with a concentration in Finance. She recently received her MESc from the Yale School of Forestry where she studied environmental economics, dynamic systems modeling, and industrial ecology. For her thesis, she adapted William Nordhaus’ RICE 2010 model to include a multi-agent decision platform. Her adjustments were used to evaluate the environmental and economic impact of various scenarios of national and multinational negotiating decisions. Rachel will continue to explore how financing mechanisms and environmental policies can be used to improve the allocation of natural resources. She loves last-minute adventures, spell-check, and the humor of Zach Galifianakis.

Zack is a PhD student focusing on defense strategy and policy. Since graduating from the Woodrow Wilson School’s MPA program he has worked as a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. He previously served on the National Security Council staff at the White House and in the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon. Zack graduated with Honors in International Security Studies from Stanford University. He met his wife, Laurie, while they were MPA students at the Woodrow Wilson School.

Joshua is second year PhD candidate in the Science, Technology and Environmental Policy (STEP) track.  He is interested in using the tools of urban economics, computer science and psychology to study the link between transparency and governance in developing countries. With a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa, he has worked extensively on technology policy and open development projects with the World Bank Group, the United States Government, Google Inc., and UNICEF.

Phil worked on water treatment projects in Brazil and solar power in Burkina Faso through Engineers Without Borders at the University of Maryland, where he studied mechanical engineering and was a student climate change activist. In 2009 he helped with a geothermal energy study at the Joint Global Change Research Institute, and later worked with the US Department of the Treasury to develop guidelines for reducing international coal financing. As a Chinese Government Scholar at a UN Environment Program institute in Shanghai, he studied Chinese energy policy, analytical methodologies for climate change burden sharing, and China-Africa cooperation on renewable energy technology. Phil has braved the Beijing smog with the Natural Resource Defense Council’s China office and battled the campus monkeys at the UN Environment Program in Nairobi. For his PhD, Phil will study the implications of international climate policy for energy access in developing countries. He enjoys watercolor painting and playing guitar, and tries to cook delicious vegetarian food wherever he goes, with very occasional success.

Marina is in the final stages of the WWS Ph.D. Program. Her dissertation, which she hopes to defend in Spring 2012, develops a theory of participation in third-party military interventions or, what she calls Security Operations. Her work involves qualitative as well as quantitative research methodologies. She has put together an original dataset of all third-party interventions conducted since the end of the Cold War. She uses this dataset to test her theory of interdependence-induced security cooperation. In addition,she has conducted interviews with over 150 decision-makers in more than 10 countries to complement her statistical work and elaborate in detail the motivations of countries joining peace as well as combat operations. Prior to coming to Princeton, Marina completed a B.A. (summa cum laude) in Economics, Politics and Latin American Studies and a Double-M.S.in Development Studies and International Political Economy at Sciences Po Paris and the London School of Economics. From 2008-2009, she was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Public and International Affairs (JPIA). She also served as a Fellow with the House Ways and Means Committee and interned with the European Commission, the European Parliament, the German Foreign Office as well as NGOs in Mexico and Argentina. She speaks six languages, has lived in more than a dozen countries and traveled to many more.  In her free time, Marina is a passionate photographer and small-scale modern art collector.

Lauren joins the Woodrow Wilson School as a first year PhD student. Before coming to Princeton, she earned a BA in history from Yale University, and an MA in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She has also served with the US Department of State, coordinating initiatives in South Asia and the Middle East. Earlier in her career, she worked for several years with Sandia National Laboratories. Lauren is particularly interested in both Asia and international security, and has traveled to the region many times over the past several years.

Devin is a second year PhD student.  Before joining the program he completed a thesis in economics that examines the costs of sovereign default and another in political science that assesses the relationship between a government’s political ideology and economic growth.  He also worked on issues in health, law and economics at National Economic Research Associates.  His interests are in political economy, health policy and the intersection of business and government.  Devin is an avid sports fan who played on UCSD’s NCAA baseball team.

Born and raised in South Dakota, Steven’s only regret about serving in the US Army is not being able to get back to his home state as often as he would like. Steven attended the University of Cambridge following his commissioning where he earned an M.Phil in International Studies Since returning to the Army, he served in various positions as an operations officer before transitioning to a military strategist, most recently serving as a strategic plans and policy officer for US Army Europe. Steven’s academic interests include security studies and strategy, military professionalism and organizational change, all of which he expects his research on the growing role of building partnership capacity in US security policy to incorporate. He spends his personal time reading fiction, playing and following sports, and starting a brew-pub back in South Dakota.
 

Darren Lim
Monash University, 2004
Economics/Law, BA/LLB
Princeton University, 2009
International Relations, MPA
Cluster: Security Studies
Melbourne, Australia 

Darren entered the WWS PhD program in 2009 having just graduated from the MPA program. Prior to joining WWS in 2007, he completed separate honors degrees in economics and law at Monash University (in his hometown of Melbourne, Australia). After commencing his legal career at a corporate firm, he then served as Associate (Law Clerk) to the Chief Justice of the Federal Court of Australia. Unwilling, however, to abandon economics, just prior to arriving at Princeton he tutored undergraduate courses as an assistant lecturer at his alma mater. Having never taken a political science course before the Woo, applying to the PhD was obviously never his ultimate goal. Nevertheless, he found at WWS that he liked how politics and public policy incorporated his previous interests in law and economics in broader questions of how the world works.  Darren is interested in the economic component of international security, in particular, how monetary and financial tools of statecraft can be used to project power, and how the recent financial crisis might reshape international politics. Outside work and study, Darren enjoys working out at the gym and jogging through Princeton’s beautiful surrounds, loves a good cup of coffee or glass of Australian red wine and, having lived in Belgium twice – the second for his MPA summer internship at International Crisis Group in Brussels – Darren has a passion for Belgian beer.

Ezequiel is finishing his third year as a PhD student in Political Economy at Princeton University and holds a Licentiate and a Master’s Degree in Economics from Universidad Nacional de La Plata in Argentina. During his first year at Princeton, Ezequiel was awarded the Lassen Fellowship and research grant, awarded by the Program in Latin America Studies at Princeton University due to his commitment to the study of the region and outstanding academic record. Before joining the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, Ezequiel was a Junior Professional Associate at the Poverty and Gender Unit for the Latin American Region at the World Bank. He will take his general examinations in Political Economy and in Quantitative Methods. His areas of interest are political economy of development, government accountability as well as development economics.

Julia is a first-year PhD student in the WWS’s new Security Studies program, where she plans to study multilateral security cooperation. She graduated from the WWS’s MPA program in 2010 and worked for a year for the US Department of State as a Presidential Management Fellow. Prior to the MPA program, she worked at the FBI as an intelligence analyst. Julia is a graduate of Duke University (2004), and shares a passion for college basketball with her husband Roy Hwang, a fellow Duke graduate.

John is interested in the role of the state in shaping patterns of human movement and migration. He is a fourth-year PhD student and focusing his dissertation on questions related to spatial segregation.  John has worked for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and various NGOs on issues of forced displacement, asylum, citizenship, and statelessness in Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo, and Montenegro.  He has also served as a law clerk, mediator, and staff attorney for the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and he has done empirical research on the dynamics of immigration litigation at the judicial and administrative levels in the United States.

Before coming to WWS, Wei studied at Peking University for her bachelor degree in environmental science. Her previous research employed molecular epidemiology approaches to study air pollution and human health. She actively participated in a panel study on children, before and during the 2008 Beijing Olympic, in order to find the correlation between air pollution level and lipid peroxidation, an important toxicological mechanism by which air pollution might cause damage on human health. She would like to continue her exploration on issues related with environmental health at WWS. She is quite engaged in volunteering. She served with the 2008 Beijing Olympic as well as other non-profit environment activities. In her spare time, Wei is a big fan of Chinese folk dance.

Caroline received her undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering from MIT in 2006 and subsequently completed a master’s degree from the War Studies Department at King’s College London, where she wrote her thesis on the potential of space weapons technology to attenuate state ambitions for military dominance. Prior to coming to Princeton, she was a research assistant with the RAND Corporation, focusing on prospective nuclear force posture challenges in future arms control agreements.  Caroline is pursuing similar issues in further depth during her doctoral studies, and hopes eventually to contribute to US bilateral and multilateral treaty negotiations focused on reductions in nuclear arsenals. Caroline is also a member of two programs sponsored by the Project on Nuclear Issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies: the Next Generation Working Group on US-Russian Arms Control and the 2011 Nuclear Scholars Initiative.

Beth is a third-year PhD student from Vancouver, Canada.  Before coming to Princeton she worked as a Research Assistant with the Canadian Aboriginal AIDS Network on two community-based research projects on homophobia and sexual violence among HIV positive aboriginal women in Canada.  Other past work experience includes Equitas – the International Centre for Human Right Education, the Institute of Health and Social Policy at McGill University, and Liverpool VCT Care and Treatment in Nairobi, Kenya.  Her research interests centre on HIV/AIDS, partnership formation and sexual network analysis.  Beth has spent the past two summers at Princeton conducting research with the Medical Research Council and the Ugandan Virus Research Institute at their demographic surveillance site in South-Western Uganda.  Her ongoing work includes an examination of the impact of HIV on martial dissolution and migration, and the effect of extra-spousal partnerships on HIV transmission.

Joël is an urban planner by profession, specialized in project management and environmental planning, who was most recently working on a large-scale urban revitalization project in Montreal, Canada, as well as teaching his 2 year-old son to do yoga. His research interests pertain to metropolitan governance, urban agriculture and the role of cities in sustainable development. Joël tried several times to become a vegetarian, but so far he has failed.

Heidi is a fifth-year PhD student at the Woodrow Wilson School and the Office of Population Research. Heidi is interested in investigating health in developing countries, with particular attention to vulnerable populations, including women, children, and migrants. Her background is in public health. Since coming to Princeton she has co-authored two papers examining health in Mexico and she conducted a pilot study on mental health and project-induced migration in Turkey. She is currently completing her dissertation, which explores social inequality, migration, and health in Mexico.