Eleanor Atkins is a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is also a China and the World Program Fellow at the Columbia-Harvard China and the World Program. Her research focuses on Chinese foreign policy, particularly the intersection of diplomatic statecraft and military power. At CFR, she is writing a book on China’s history of security cooperation with other states and conducting research on China’s nuclear modernization and evolving strategic posture.
Previously, Atkins was a predoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, a Morgenthau Grand Strategy Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, a National Bureau of Asian Research Chinese Language Fellow at National Taiwan University, and a James C. Gaither Junior Fellow in the China Studies Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She also worked as a research assistant at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center.
Atkins earned her PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with concentrations in security studies and international relations. She holds a BA in political science with highest honors from the University of California, Berkeley and an MA in global affairs from Tsinghua University, where she was a Schwarzman Scholar.