I am a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Leadership and Command and Control at the Swedish Defence University. I am also an Associate Research Fellow at the Swedish Institute for International Affairs and an Adjunct Fellow with the Griffith Asia Institute. Before coming to Stockholm I was an Analyst for the Office of National Intelligence, Australia's peak intelligence assessment agency. Prior to that I was a Lecturer in the Department of Security Studies and Criminology, Macquarie University, Sydney. I graduated with a PhD from the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, ANU, where I was a TB Millar Scholar, and I earned an AM in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania where I was a Benjamin Franklin Fellow and Mumford Fellow. I have also been a Non-Resident WSD-Handa Fellow at the CSIS Pacific Forum and a Robert O'Neill Scholar at the International Institute for Strategic Studies' Asia office in Singapore. My research focuses on strategic studies and the foreign and defence policies of Indo-Pacific countries, namely Taiwan, Japan and Australia.
My first book Explaining Contemporary Military Modernization: The Myth of Asia's Arms Race (Routledge, 2021) examined the political motivations for setting defence capabilities in the contested waters of Asia and the implication for arms racing theory. I spoke about it at the Sydney Opera's Festival of Dangerous Ideas and its findings were commissioned as an Australian Strategic Policy Institute report. I have also published in the Texas National Security Review, Survival, the RUSI Journal and the Australian Journal of International Affairs. I am a regular contributor to East Asia Forum. I also engage with the media and I have provided commentary for TIME, The New York Times, ABC News and The Sydney Morning Herald. My research has also been cited in Der Spiegel and The Wall Street Journal.