Amy J. Nelson is a Nonresident Fellow with Stimson’s Conventional Defense Program. Her areas of expertise include arms control, emerging weapons technologies, the defense trade, negotiation under uncertainty, and nuclear security. Prior to joining Stimson, she was a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where she worked on her book manuscript on next generation arms control. Her book offers new best practices for arms control negotiations through the identification of trends revealed through empirical analysis of a novel dataset, and an analysis of the effect of missing information on the negotiation process. Nelson was previously a policy analyst in the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, where she reported violations of the Arms Export Control Act to Congress and worked to align domestic munitions regulations and international treaty obligations with particular emphasis on emerging technologies. She was a Pre-doctoral Fellow at the Stimson Center and SIPRI North America, and conducted dissertation research as a member of the U.S. arms control delegation to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which maintains the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty.
Nelson’s writings have appeared in Foreign Affairs, the National Interest, the Washington Post, War on the Rocks, the International Business Times, the Millennium Journal of International Studies, Political Psychology and the Journal of Neurophysiology.
Nelson received her A.B. in Philosophy from Stanford University. She has an M.A. in Intellectual History from Columbia University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.