Research Team | Indo-Pacific Policy Lab

Meet Our Team

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Lab Director

Dr. Oriana Skylar Mastro

Oriana Mastro is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Courtesy Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University where her research focuses on Chinese military and security policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, war termination, and coercive diplomacy. She is also a nonresident scholar, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She was previously an assistant professor of security studies at Georgetown University.

Mastro continues to serve in the United States Air Force Reserve for which she currently works at the Pentagon as Deputy Chief of Reserve China Global Strategy. For her contributions to U.S. strategy in Asia, she won the Individual Reservist of the Year Award in 2016 and 2022 (FGO). She has published widely, including in International Security, Security Studies, Foreign Affairs, Journal of Strategic Studies, The Washington Quarterly, the Economist and the New York Times. Her most recent book, Upstart: How China Became a Great Power (Oxford University Press, 2024), evaluates China’s approach to competition. Her book, The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime, (Cornell University Press, 2019), won the 2020 American Political Science Association International Security Section Best Book by an Untenured Faculty Member. She holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University.

Hrishita works as the lead Research Assistant to Dr. Oriana Skylar Mastro. She graduated with an MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago in June 2023 and a BA in Political Science and Government with minors in Pre-Law and Communication from Caldwell University in May 2022. Prior to joining Stanford, she worked as an RA for Dr. Paul Staniland and was the media intern at the Center for International Social Science Research at UChicago. Her research interests include Chinese security, Great Power Competition, South Asian Security, nuclear arms control and nonproliferation, and nuclear deterrence, with a regional focus on South and East Asia.

Research Associate

Hrishita Badu

Research Assistants

Research assistants are from Stanford, Princeton, Yale, Indiana University, UC Berkeley, Michigan, and Sapienza University. They have been partially supported through Stanford's China Fund, Japan Fund and its Political Science Summer Research College.

Caleb Bello

Caleb is a junior at Princeton University majoring in Politics with minors in East Asian Studies (EAS) and History and the Practice of Diplomacy (HPD). His academic interests include East Asian geopolitics and classical Chinese literature. He is an undergraduate fellow for the Center on International Security Studies at Princeton.

Christina Cheng

Christina is a senior at Stanford University majoring in History, minoring in East Asian Studies and coterming in Computer Science on the Computer and Network Security track. She has worked at the China Studies Centre at Riga Stradins University in Riga, Latvia and the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council in Washington DC. On campus, she is on the board of Stanford in Government, plays trumpet and works as a research assistant in the History department.

Brynn Hochman

Brynn graduated from Stanford, majoring in Science, Technology, and Society with a concentration in Communication and Media, and minoring in East Asian Studies with a focus on China. She served as a research assistant for the Superpower California project, the Stanford Social Media Lab, and the Stanford Constitutional Law Center. Brynn has also worked with the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Justice Conviction Review Unit on issues of wrongful conviction.

Tianren Li

Tianren (Tina) Li is a junior majoring in International Relations and minoring in history at Stanford. She has been working with Prof. Mastro since her sophomore year and is interested in studying international history and culture. At Stanford she is the Co-Editor in Chief of Stanford Journal of International Affairs and a member of different pre-law society clubs. She enjoys photography and live music in her free time!

Emanuela Piroli

Emanuela works as the Research Assistant to Dr. Oriana Skylar Mastro. She graduated in International Studies from the University of Trento in 2023 and she is now majoring in International Relations, particularly in Global Security, at University of Sapienza. Her interests include strategic military competition, specifically in the Indo-Pacific, with a regional focus on South and East Asia

Kasha Tyranski

Kasha is a senior at Stanford studying Economics and Italian.

Elsa Zhou

Elsa is a junior at Stanford University majoring in Economics. Last summer, she interned at the Hudson Institute under Senior Fellow Thomas Duesterberg to evaluate the social safety net in China. She is interested in international development broadly and China’s economy.