Laura Resnick Samotin was a nonresident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Strategy Initiative in the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

Resnick Samotin is the post-doctoral fellow in national security and intelligence at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. She obtained a PhD in political science at Columbia University, where she focused on the non-material determinants of military effectiveness. Her dissertation examined how militarism contributes to a reduction in military effectiveness and adverse war outcomes via the generation of disintegrated wartime grand strategy. In addition to her work on intelligence and grand strategy, she conducts research on political psychology, specifically on bias in decision-making processes, on US foreign policy, and on military technological innovation.

Resnick Samotin was a Cordier fellow in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia from 2016 to 2021. She was awarded a pre-doctoral fellowship at the Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy at the University of Southern California in Fall 2018 and a Hans Morgenthau pre-doctoral fellowship at the University of Notre Dame in Spring 2020. Her work has been funded by the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library’s Scowcroft O’Donnell Grant and a Charles Koch Foundation dissertation development grant for the study of grand strategy.

Before starting her PhD, she was a researcher at the Good Judgement Project at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a BA in political science from the University of Pennsylvania and an MA and master of philosophy from Columbia University.