​I am a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Starting in 2023, I will be an Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School's Business, Government and the International Economy (BGIE) unit.

My research examines political extremism, destigmatization, and radicalization, focusing on the role of popularity cues in online media. My related research examines a broad range of threats to democratic governance, including authoritarian encroachment, ethnic prejudice in public goods allocation, and misinformation. 

​My dissertation won APSA's Ernst B. Haas Award for the best dissertation on European Politics. I am currently working on my book project, Engineering Extremism, with generous funding from the William F. Milton Fund at Harvard.

My published work has appeared in the American Political Science Review,  Governance,  International Studies Quarterly, Public Administration Review, and the Virginia Journal of International Law, along with an edited volume in Democratization (Oxford University Press). My research has been featured in KQED/NPR, The Washington Post, and VICE News.
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I received my Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley in 2020. I was a Predoctoral Research Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University and the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet. I hold a B.A. (Magna Cum Laude; Phi Beta Kappa) from Cornell University and an M.A. (with Distinction) from the University of California, Berkeley.

Anna Weichselbraun is a former Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow (2016-2018). She is a research and teaching postdoc at the Department of European Ethnology at the University of Vienna. Her research examines the governance of technologies as well as technologies of governance.

In her book The Nuclear Order of Things: Making Safeguards Technical at the IAEA, Anna provides an intimate view of the practices and activities of nuclear safeguards inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency, and connects these quotidian practices to the geopolitics of nuclear governance.

Her current project explores problems of Anthropocene governance, that is, the social mechanisms and technological infrastructures by which humans attempt to mitigate the uncertainty emanating from each other and their environments. In 2022-23 she is a USC-Berggruen fellow looking at how experiments in blockchain-based organizational forms can inform new visions of global governance.

Dr. Anna Péczeli is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Security Research (CGSR) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She is also an affiliate at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University, and an affiliate at the Institute for Strategic and Defense Studies (ISDS) at the National University of Public Service in Budapest, Hungary.

From 2019 to 2022, Anna was a postdoctoral research fellow at CGSR. Prior to that, she worked at Stanford University: in 2018-2019 she was a visiting postdoctoral research scholar at The Europe Center, and in 2016-2017 she was a Stanton nuclear security fellow at CISAC. In Hungary, she was a senior research fellow at ISDS, an assistant lecturer at Corvinus University of Budapest, and an adjunct fellow at the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs. During her PhD studies, she held a visiting research fellowship at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, and a visiting Fulbright fellowship at the Nuclear Information Project of the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, DC.

She earned a PhD degree in International Relations from Corvinus University of Budapest. Her research focuses on U.S. nuclear posture, in particular the changes and continuities in U.S. nuclear strategy since the end of the Cold War. Her research areas also include the future of arms control and strategic risk reduction in a multi-domain environment, extended nuclear deterrence in Europe, and NATO’s defense policy. Anna is a member of the CSIS Project on Nuclear Issues mid-career cadre, the European Defence and Security Network, the EU Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Consortium, and former chair of the Executive Board of the International Student/Young Pugwash group.