APP Announces New Postdoctoral Affiliates

The Asia Policy Program is proud to announce that it has accepted three new postdoctoral affiliates: Dr. Brian Leung, Dr. Tomer Nisimov, and Dr. Kunal Singh.

Dr Brian Leung is an America in the World Consortium Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin’s Clements Center for National Security. His research examines the political economy of trade, technology, and industrial policy. Specifically, he is interested in how business interests shape, and are shaped by, foreign policymaking and geoeconomic competition, with a focus on U.S.–China relations. His current book project explains the unraveling of the U.S.–China engagement consensus, tracing how China’s state-capitalist model fractured the American business coalition that had long anchored engagement in Washington. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Washington and his B.Soc.Sc. and LL.B. from the University of Hong Kong. In Fall 2027, he will join American University’s School of International Service as an assistant professor in the Department of Politics, Governance, and Economics.

Dr. Tomer Nisimov is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the America in the World Consortium at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. in history from Princeton University, where he studied under Stephen Kotkin. His research focuses on the political, military, and ethnopolitical history of twentieth-century Eurasia, particularly Northeast Asia—China, Korea, Mongolia, and the Soviet Union/Russia—with an emphasis on geopolitics, nationalism, borderlands, and international relations. His research draws on multilingual archival sources in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Mongolian, and Japanese. Tomer has lived, studied, and conducted archival research across Asia over several years, including in mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan. He works on transnational and comparative history projects spanning the Second World War, China’s Civil War, the Korean War, the Cold War, and the Sino-Soviet split. He also researches the intelligence agencies and spymasters of the Republic of China.

Dr. Kunal Singh is a political scientist specializing in nuclear weapons and international security. He earned his Ph.D. from MIT’s Security Studies Program in the Department of Political Science. Prior to joining UT Austin, he served as a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He also holds a B.Tech(honors) in Metallurgical and Materials Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

Kunal’s research interests include nuclear proliferation, nuclear weapons deployment strategies, grand strategy, and regional security in South Asia. His dissertation, also his first book project, develops a typology of counterproliferation strategies and offers a theory explaining how states select among them. In addition to his academic work, Kunal regularly writes about security and defense policy for leading outlets. He has been published in War on the Rocks, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Hindustan Times, among others.