Korbel School's Sié Center Awards 2016-2017 Post-Doctoral Fellowships

The Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy at the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School of International Studies has awarded post-doctoral fellowships for the 2016-2017 academic year to two outstanding junior scholars.

Michael Kalin is currently a Sié Center visiting scholar and a PhD candidate in Political Science at Yale University. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of communal violence, with particular interest in religious conflict. Kalin's dissertation involves designing interventions that reduce prejudice and promote tolerance among religious groups and evaluating their impact empirically in Chad and Pakistan. Before attending graduate school, he worked for several years as a political analyst supporting the Government of Canada's National Security Advisor, Prime Minister and Cabinet and as a political officer in Afghanistan with the Canadian embassy in Kabul.

Evan Perkoski is currently a research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Perkoski's research explores violent and nonviolent uprisings, the interactions between non-state actors, and the organizational dynamics of terrorist, insurgent and rebel groups. His dissertation research at the University of Pennsylvania sought to understand important variation in the behavior and durability of militant splinters – those groups that form by breaking away from preexisting organizations.

Kalin and Perkoski will join the Sié Center team in September 2017 and will spend one year in residence as post-doctoral fellows, working closely with Sié Center faculty mentors while developing their own research and publications. They will join seven full-time faculty, three staff and more than 35 MA and PhD research assistants at the center, who together collaborate on more than 12 ongoing research projects, and organize annual speaker and lecture series, workshops and a vibrant student fellowship program.

The post-doctoral fellowship program at the Sié Center aims to support and train exceptional early-career scholars committed to policy-relevant research on the changing trends in conflict and violence. The center currently has three post-doctoral fellows in residence, all with a focus on the impact non-state actors have on the course of conflict. ¬With Sié Center faculty and policy community mentors, fellows conduct their own research and contribute to collaborative research efforts on designed to inform (and be informed by) contemporary policy concerns and goals.