Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies
Upasana Singh
Reppy Fellow 2025-26
Upasana Singh is a J.S.D. candidate at the Cornell Law School. She is also working as a research assistant with Carl Marks Professor of International Studies at Cornell University, Dr. Kaushik Basu. She holds an LL.M. from Cornell Law School with a focus on conflict resolution and restorative justice. She serves on the review board of the Indian Law Institute Law Review.
Prior to this, she served as an Assistant Professor of Law in India and practiced as an advocate in the Supreme Court of India and the High Court of Delhi.
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Sebastian Restrepo
Reppy Fellow 2025-26
Sebastian Restrepo is a PhD student in the Department of City and Regional Planning. His research interests focus on the institutional arrangements to improve the implementation of peace agreements in conflict or post-conflict regions. He has more than fifteen (15) years of experience designing and implementing regional development programs.
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Program
Role
- Student
- PACS Current Graduate Fellow
- Graduate Student
Contact
Email: sebas.restrepo85@gmail.com
Saomai Nguyen
Reppy Fellow 2025-26
Saomai Phuong Nguyen (they/she) is a PhD student in the Department of History, focusing on Asian/American history. Their research examines refugee transits and passages after the war in Vietnam, particularly the in-waiting site of the refugee camp and how the children of refugees come to remember, understand, and embody their parents’ displacement and resettlement through memory work and cultural productions.
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Or Aroch
Reppy Fellow 2025-26; Evangelista Fellow 2026-27
Or Aroch is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology. His research focuses on education and childhood in the context of Israel/Palestine. He examines how educational processes and children’s experiences in conflict-ridden Israel transform amid war, political instability, and civic upheaval, with attention to processes of militarization and nationalization, negotiations over future visions and collective memory, and the role of democratic and peace education in these circumstances.
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Kyaw Hsan Hlaing
Reppy Fellow 2025-26
Kyaw Hsan Hlaing is a PhD student in the Department of Government. He studies comparative politics and international relations with a focus on political violence, insurgency, authoritarianism, and regime change, exploring dynamics of civil conflict and post-war transitions.
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Cassidy Fowler
Reppy Fellow 2025-26; Evangelista Fellow 2026-27
Cassidy Fowler is a PhD student in the Department of Government. Her research focuses on international security, with a particular interest in nuclear weapons strategy and operations, IR theory, and security studies.
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Anurag Koyyada
Graduate Student, Reppy Fellow 2025-26
Anurag Koyyada is a JD candidate at Cornell Law School. He enjoys interpreting rules and designing technologies in defense, national security, and space contexts. Anurag is interested in how law, society, and technology interact in military and surveillance contexts. His work, as it relates to conflict and security, examines how emerging technologies both mirror and mold societal power, both constraining and enabling peace.
Additional Information
Program
Role
- Student
- PACS Current Graduate Fellow
- Graduate Student
Contact
Email: ak2542@cornell.edu
What Does U.S. Military Disengagement Mean for European Security?
Agnieszka Nimark, PACS Visiting Scholar
“After decades of providing security guarantees for Europe, the recent announcement of the US plans to reduce its troops has reignited debates not only about the European security but also about Europe’s nuclear deterrence,” writes Agnes Nimark.
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2025 Peter Katzenstein Book Prize
The Katzenstein Prize, in honor of Peter J. Katzenstein, the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies at Cornell University, recognizes an outstanding first book in International Relations, Comparative Politics, or Political Economy. The prize was established on the occasion of Professor Katzenstein’s 40th Year at Cornell University and has been made possible by the generous support of his colleagues, collaborators, and former students.
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Richard Garwin, Physicist and Nuclear Arms Control Advocate, Dies at 97
By Rebecca Slayton, PACS Director
Richard Garwin, an innovative physicist who made major contributions to nuclear weapons development while also advocating for nuclear arms control, died on May 13, 2025, at the age of 97.
Described by his biographer as the “most influential scientist you’ve never heard of,” Garwin played a crucial role in the design of the first nuclear fusion weapon, which was detonated in the Marshall Islands in November 1952. Garwin went on to advise several presidents and spent much of his career at IBM Research, working first out of Columbia University and then Yorktown Heights.
Garwin also had a special relationship to Cornell University, collaborating with physics professor and Nobel laureate Hans Bethe on arms control efforts for several decades, and becoming an A.D. White Professor in the mid-1980s. While at Cornell, Garwin played an important role in the intellectual life of the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies.
Herb Lin, who was then a postdoctoral researcher at the Reppy Institute, recalls first meeting Garwin at Cornell: “I was quite excited to be able to learn from him and to engage him as a colleague, so I was taken down a few pegs when our first interaction was him asking me to get him coffee.”
Lin, who subsequently pursued a distinguished career at the National Academy of Sciences and then Stanford University, notes that over the next 40 years, “our relationship evolved to be more peer-like, but truth be told, I’ve never met anyone who was really a true peer of Garwin’s.”
For more on Garwin’s life and legacy, see this collection of essays published in the May 2025 issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
Photo credit: Richard Garwin, Kurt Gottfried and Hans Bethe at a press conference on missile defense, March 22, 1984. Source: James J. MacKenzie, flickr.com.