Volume 34 | 2022-2023
EDITORS-IN-CHIEF
Allison Blauvelt
Raised in Connecticut, Allison moved to Washington D.C. to study international relations at American University. After graduation she joined Deloitte, where she provided intelligence analysis in support of Federal clients in their counter-proliferation, sanctions, and other national security efforts. In 2016, she lived in Germany for a year as part of the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange for Young Professionals before returning to Deloitte. At Princeton, her academic interests include threat finance and transatlantic security cooperation.
Ellen Swicord
Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, Ellen attended the University of Chicago and graduated in 2018 with a B.A. in political science and East Asian languages and civilizations. She comes to Princeton from Washington, D.C., where she worked as Research Associate for Korea Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ellen first became interested in the Korean Peninsula in 2009, when she traveled to South Korea to participate in the inaugural Camp Fulbright Junior Internship Program. She lived in South Korea for two years, studying Korean intensively as a recipient of the Boren Scholarship and participant in the National Security Language Initiative for Youth (NSLI-Y) program. Ellen has served as an intern at the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Korean Affairs and as a Young Fellow at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology’s Nuclear Nonproliferation Education and Research Center. After graduation, Ellen hopes to work on issues of U.S.-South Korea alliance management and North Korean nuclear nonproliferation.
MANAGING EDITOR
Auri Minaya
Auri majored in economics at the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra of Dominican Republic. After three years of work in the private sector, she joined the consulting team of the Ministry of Economy, Planning and Development, where she worked on the design of sectorial studies for educational reform, social and economic policies related to the COVID-19 crisis and post-lockdown economic recovery. At the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and SMEs, she participated in the design of Dominican Republic’s 2021-2024 National Industrialization Plan and designed the first visual database of the manufacturing sector of the Dominican Republic.
DIGITAL EDITOR
Michelle Zhang
Michelle is a PhD student in Security Studies at Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs. Her research interests focus primarily on the issues of limited resources and competition in the space sector and how those aspects affect the policies driving the operationalization and commercialization of space technologies. She is also interested in the intersections between space and cybersecurity. Prior to Princeton, she worked for the FBI in the New York Field Office after interning in the Cincinnati Field Office. Michelle holds a dual B.A. in English and Security & Intelligence with a minor in Japanese from The Ohio State University.
DEPUTY EDITORS-IN-CHIEF
Justin Schuster
Justin is pursuing his Master in Public Affairs in International Relations at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA). Prior to SPIA, Justin worked as the Associate Director of Education at the Council on Foreign Relations, leading an editorial team responsible for creating World101—an expanding library of multimedia primers on international relations and U.S. foreign policy. Previously, he worked in Amman, Jordan, as a reporter, translator, and managing director at Syria Direct, an award-winning, nonprofit journalism organization, training Syrian and international reporters in professional, bilingual news gathering while covering the Syrian civil war. He is fluent in Arabic and graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in Global Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, Justin’s professional interests lie primarily at the intersection of climate change, conflict prevention, and human rights.
Maya Woser
Maya is originally from New Delhi, India. She graduated high school from the Mahindra United World College of India, and attended Middlebury College for her undergraduate studies, where she majored in International Politics and Economics. Since then, she's worked in economics and data-focused roles across the private and public sectors. Most recently, she was a Research Manager at Precision Development, a nonprofit that provides mobile phone-based, customized agricultural advisory to smallholder farmers. Through her work, she's developed an interest in behavioral science and evidence-based public program design and implementation, which is the area she hopes to work in following the MPA.
DEPUTY MANAGING EDITOR
Omar Elhaj
Raised in Northern Virginia and originally from Palestine, Omar is a first-year MPA student. He specializes in human rights, social justice, and religious and ethnic conflict prevention. His regional focus is in the Middle East and North Africa. He wrote his senior thesis on academic conceptualizations of the Islamic State. After graduating with a B.A. in Political & Social Thought and Economics from the University of Virginia, Omar worked as a data analyst at NGA in Washington, D.C., performing data analytics on a broad array of security-related issues. In his free time, Omar loves making pour-over coffee, supporting Liverpool FC, and playing volleyball with his friends.
DEPUTY DIGITAL EDITOR
Anna Blue
Anna Blue is a first-year MPA student originally from Washington, D.C. Before arriving at Princeton, Anna worked in international crisis management for Meta for three years. Her other work experience includes serving at a think tank in Los Angeles and conducting research on digital government services in Estonia as a Fulbright Fellow. She has a B.A. in International Relations from Stanford University, where she wrote an honors thesis on religious violence in Mexico. She loves Ethiopian food, scuba diving, and any time spent outside in the sun!