Announcing the 2022 Templeton Fellows

• April 11, 2022

The Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) is pleased to announce the appointment of its 2022 Templeton Fellows. Templeton Fellows work across FPRI’s research programs on a variety of projects throughout the year.

The Templeton Fellowships are named for the late John M. Templeton, Jr., M.D., who had a decades-long association with FPRI, serving as Vice Chair of FPRI’s Board of Trustees and, along with his beloved wife Josephine “Pina” Templeton, generously supported FPRI for many years. We’re deeply grateful to them both and to the Templeton Family and the Psalm 103 Foundation for their support to FPRI and its mission. 

Africa

Jessica Pickering is a 2022 Templeton Fellow within the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Africa Program. In May 2022, she will graduate from Tulane University in New Orleans with her MA in Homeland Security and a certificate in intelligence. From the University of Washington in Seattle, she received her BA in International Affairs focusing on foreign policy, diplomacy, peace, and security. She served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guinea, West Africa, where she taught secondary mathematics and English and established gender equality initiatives through an after-school girls program. Her research interests include international security, foreign policy, and the effects of gender equity, climate change, and governance on policy and stability in West Africa\

 Asia

Flora Yan is a 2022 Templeton Fellow in the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a Research Associate focusing on China at the National Association of Scholars. Her work explores US-China relations, paradiplomacy, and PRC transnational repression activities. She is the author of an ongoing series titled “How China Influences Measures and Interferes in Democratic Processes of U.S. State Legislatures” in The Diplomat. Her writings have also appeared in Jamestown Foundation’s China Brief and Hong Kong Free Press. She holds a B.A. in political science and communication from the University of Washington.

Eurasia

Rob Lee is a 2022 Templeton Fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia Program. He is a PhD student researching Russian defense policy at King’s College London’s War Studies Department. He is a former Marine infantry officer, Alfa Fellow, and visiting fellow at the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST), a Russian think tank focused on defense policy.

 

Geopolitics

Robert D. Kaplan, the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, is the bestselling author of nineteen books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including The Good American, The Revenge of Geography, Asia’s Cauldron, Monsoon, The Coming Anarchy, and Balkan Ghosts. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. He was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the U.S. Navy’s Executive Panel. Foreign Policy magazine twice named him one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.”

Middle East

Aaron Stein is a 2022 Templeton Fellow and the Director of Research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). Previously, Dr. Stein was a resident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council, where he managed their Turkey-related research program, oversaw work on nonproliferation in the Middle East with a focus on Iran, and researched non-state actors in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Kurdish groups in Syria and Iraq. He also hosts the Arms Control Wonk and the Chain Reaction podcasts. 

 

National Security 

Philip Wasielewski is a 2022 Templeton Fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s National Security Program. He is a former Paramilitary Case Officer who had a 31-year career in the Directorate of Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency.  He was a member of the first CIA team into Afghanistan in 2001 and served a three-year assignment on the National Security Council staff as the Director for Intelligence and Covert Action programs.  His CIA career was paralleled by a concurrent 30-year Marine Corps career (7 years active duty and 23 reserve) as an infantry officer including mobilizations for Afghanistan and Iraq.  Philip Wasielewski graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983 with a B.A. in International Relations and European History.  He also has an M.A. from Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian Studies and an M.A. in National Security Studies from the Army War College.