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The Center for Strategic and International Studies is a non-profit think tank located in Washington, DC and provides strategic insights and policy solutions to the world’s decision makers. CSIS is always looking for talented individuals with diverse perspectives to make a greater impact on our world. CSIS offers career tracks for both research and administrative focused individuals. We pride ourselves on providing staff and researchers with a collaborative work environment while also acknowledging individual achievements.

Apply today if you are interested in leading the next generation of policymakers!

CSIS is an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer.  CSIS does not discriminate based on race, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, physical or mental disability, marital status, veteran status, or other factors protected by law.  Application materials will be carefully reviewed, and interview decisions will be based on how closely an applicant’s background and experience matches the needs of the open position.  Due to the large volume of resumes, we are unable to personally acknowledge each applicant; only those applicants selected for an interview will be personally contacted.    If you need additional assistance or accommodations, you may contact the Office of Human Resources at  [email protected]  or via telephone at 202-887-0200.

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Consultor/a, Especialista en comunicaciones para la prevención de la corrupción en la gestión forestal Programa de Corrupción Verde, América Latina

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Organisation Basel Institute on Governance

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American Enterprise Institute   The American Enterprise Institute is a community of scholars and supporters committed to expanding liberty, increasing individual opportunity and strengthening free enterprise. AEI is dedicated to research and education on issues of government, politics, economics and social welfare. Internship application deadlines: accepted on a rolling basis. It is recommended that you submit your application as early as possible for each term. 

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Council on Foreign Relations The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher. Applications are accepted as needed. 

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At PRA our main objectives are to: 1) inform and strengthen the work of frontline social justice partners; 2) expose and isolate organized opponents of human and civil rights; and, 3) shape public debate of key issues, using our profile as a think tank to open space for partners to advance needed solutions. Distinct from some other “watchdog” organizations, social justice groups comprise PRA ’s principal constituency. PRA is likewise unusual in having a broad focus across many sectors of the Right, from neo-Nazis to free-market neoliberals.

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‘When you work with the same elderly people with autism for a long time, you can get them more actively involved in the research’

Hilde Geurts shows how to systematically collaborate in scientific research on autism: with clinicians, but more importantly: with the people affected

In 2009, Geurts received a question from a patients’ association: why is so little known about elderly people with autism? ‘I had noticed myself that hardly anything had been written about this in the literature. Based on this observation, we started having casual conversations with the target group: we asked how things were going, what kind of issues they had encountered and what they had questions about. After this stock-taking exercise, we began a larger and more structured investigation.’

Geurts co-founded the Academic Workshop on Autism in partnership with several clinical institutions, with the aim of finding a better way to transfer knowledge from science to practice.

The most diverse think-tank possible

Geurts held interviews for a kind of “think-tank” of over-55s with autism. Interest groups could nominate people to participate. The research team tried to assemble as diverse a group as possible: by gender and time of diagnosis, but also things like their views on autism. ‘At the same time, representation was tricky. People with autism sometimes have difficulty with language, but the people who signed up for this think-tank often had above-average language skills. Many of them were also highly educated. It was difficult to get a true cross-section of the population to participate.’

Increasingly intense collaboration

The selected participants met with the research team for half a day four times a year, but there was also regular email contact in between. Participants engage in active thinking, and therefore get paid for their time. The advantage of these kinds of collaborations is that they deliver more as the years go by. ‘I’ve been working with some of these elderly people for 12 years. By now, they’re familiar with the ins and outs of scientific research. Over the years, they’ve become more proficient, and can share ideas about things like data interpretation.’

The loyalty of think-tank participants is high. ‘When our last project wrapped up, all of the participants indicated that they would like to participate again as soon as there was money for a new project. Participants in a think-tank for another long-term project co-wrote a research plan on GP care for autistic adults. They collaborated on the article and on a fact sheet with 22 recommendations to improve GP care in that are (in Dutch) .’

Managing expectations

‘One of the things we’ve learned while working with the various think-tanks of adults with autism and their families is that managing expectations is crucial. Participants’ expectations of the contribution they could make were sometimes too high: their input is incredibly valuable and taken very seriously, but not every individual experience or opinion is reproduced verbatim in the study. Moreover, some participants have had bad experiences with social workers and researchers. The scientific process can be very frustrating for some.’

Results in practice

In addition to her work as a researcher at the UvA, Geurts works for Leo Kannerhuis, an autism treatment centre and knowledge hub. She also works closely with other clinicians.  This allows her to respond to issues that arise in practice. One of the results from working closely with both clinicians and elderly people with autism is a psychological education module called Older and Wiser. The module discusses problems in daily life and possible solutions to them. It consists of meetings where elderly people receive information on how their brains process information, as well as on the importance of having a social network. Geurts says: ‘These meetings are not just about factual knowledge, they’re also about how people with autism and those around them experience it. These kinds of conversations increase understanding on all sides.’

The module is not the only tool to emerge from Geurts’ research. ‘Early this year, as part of three doctoral programmes, we produced some animated videos. The videos are intended as a conversation starter for practitioners and their clients with autism. They cover information processing, camouflaging autism and subgroups within autism. We’ve had a lot of positive feedback on these videos from practitioners.’

Above you can see one of the animated videos from Hilde Geurts’ research. Watch the other animated videos here and read a more detailed explanation of their content   (in Dutch).

Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences

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• 30 April 2024

The science of 3 Body Problem : what’s fact and what’s fiction?

• Sumeet Kulkarni

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Particle physicist Saul Durand (played by Jovan Adepo) and nanotechnology specialist Augustina (Auggie) Salazar (played by Eiza González) look to the sky for a signal from the alien San-Ti civilization. Credit: BFA/Ed Miller/Netflix via Alamy

An alien civilization spying on humans using quantum entanglement. A planet chaotically orbiting three stars. Nanofibres capable of slicing through Earth’s hardest substance, diamond. Despite being chock-full of hardcore science, 3 Body Problem , a television series released on 21 March by the streaming service Netflix, has been a hit with audiences. So far, it has spent five weeks straight in Netflix’s list of the top-three programmes viewed globally.

The science of Oppenheimer: meet the Oscar-winning movie’s specialist advisers

The story follows five young scientists who studied together at the University of Oxford, UK, as they grapple with mysterious deaths, particle-physics gone awry and aliens called the San-Ti who have their sights set on Earth. But how much of the science in the sci-fi epic, based on the award-winning book trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past by the Chinese writer Cixin Liu, reflects reality, and how much is wishful thinking? To find out, Nature spoke to three real-world scientists.

Xavier Dumusque is a planetary scientist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland who has studied the three-star system Alpha Centauri. Younan Xia is a materials scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta who has worked with cutting-edge nanotechnologies. Matt Kenzie is a particle physicist at the University of Cambridge, UK — and was the scientific adviser for 3 Body Problem .

Kenzie originally met two of the show’s creators, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, 14 years ago, while the pair were filming the popular fantasy saga Game of Thrones . Kenzie’s father was a director of photography for that series, and Benioff and Weiss chatted to Kenzie on set. “I was doing my PhD at the time,” Kenzie recalls, and they seemed interested in his thesis project. More than a decade later, “they e-mailed me sort of out of the blue, asking about some of the particle-physics stuff” in 3 Body Problem .

Full disclosure: spoilers ahead.

What do you think of the portrayal of scientists and their relationships in the series?

Kenzie: The lazy way of portraying scientists on screen [in other programmes and films] is as lone geniuses. For a lot of modern research, it’s not like that. The fact that the characters all know each other and are very friendly because they did their PhDs together in the same group seems very plausible. I also think most physicists are socially very capable. We work in bigger and bigger teams. You need to be able to communicate, you need to be able to lead if you’re in a successful academic position, you have to be able to basically convince someone to fund your research, whether it’s by hiring you or by giving you funding.

Barbie and body image: a scholar’s take on the research — and the blockbuster film

One thing that’s probably not true to reality is that there are quite a few women — about half women — and a good mix of ethnic backgrounds in the actual cast of the show. The truth, sadly, is that [physics graduates] probably would be 70% white males at a place like Oxford. But, you know, we hope that that is improving. And I don’t think there’s any harm in the show trying to progress standards by displaying something a little bit more diverse.

Dumusque: Something that I liked, and it’s a little bit true, is that there are five former physics PhD students, and, in the end, there are only one or two that are still doing fundamental physics. All the others are doing other things — they are all successful. That’s the reality. I had ten close friends finishing PhDs, and now we are only two left in academia. The others are doing plenty of super-interesting things.

The San-Ti emerge from a planet in the three-body Alpha Centauri system. We’re told this means they’ve had a chaotic existence as their planet was flung between stars. Would aliens actually survive this?

Dumusque: Alpha Centauri is indeed a triple system, which has two bright stars, Alpha Centauri A and B, and a tiny star, Proxima Centauri, which is closest to us [at 1.3 parsecs away]. In fact, it was not clear for a long time if the third star, Proxima, was bound to the system — because it’s very, very far away, really at the limit of the system. The gravitational interaction of Proxima on the two main stars is extremely small. So what they’ve shown in the show — you have all this instability due to the third body — in reality, it doesn’t happen in this system.

There is a planet around Proxima, and it’s an interesting planet because the star is much smaller and cooler than our Sun. So although the planet is orbiting it with a period of just around 15 days, the surface temperature of the planet is more or less 0 °C. In terms of temperature, it could be habitable [although not comfortable]. But small stars like Proxima have a lot of magnetic activity and flares, and give out a lot of X-rays, all of which does not favour life.

The way Earth initially contacts the San-Ti is by amplifying a radio signal using the Sun. Is that possible?

Dumusque: I think it should be possible, but not in the way the 3 Body Problem shows. We can use the effect of gravitational lensing — if there is an object passing behind the Sun, we could use the mass of the Sun to amplify the [radio signal]. But it would be amplified just in one specific direction [rather than in all directions, as shown in the programme].

The San-Ti, called Trisolarans in the books, unleash high-tech particles called sophons that use quantum entanglement to observe and communicate with Earth in real time. Is this feasible?

Kenzie: The mechanism shown has been proven, and I think will soon be deployed in what is known as quantum satellite technology . You’re basically sending signals incredibly fast using entangled particles, where, when you measure the state of one, you immediately know the state of the other. However, there is still a caveat to that, which is that you cannot communicate faster than the speed of light.

[To ‘read’ the distant particle] you still need to send an electromagnetic signal to decode the information [which travels at the speed of light]. Trisolarans circumvent this by knowing about hidden dimensions. They have a way of tunnelling through or exploiting those dimensions. So it appears like they’re communicating faster than light in our three- or four-dimensional Universe (if you include time as the fourth dimension).

Younan, you haven’t seen the series yet, but you’ve watched a clip in which nanofibres made by one character slice through a huge chunk of diamond as if it were cake. Are we there yet?

Xia: First, the size of the diamond you saw in that clip, that’s impossible! If you can make that size of a diamond, I’m sure you can easily become a billionaire. As far as I know, no material has been made that’s harder than diamond. Scientists have dreamt about finding a material to beat diamond for decades. They have even identified some compounds, like [a particular type of] carbon nitride, using computer simulations, that could work, but these materials cannot be synthesized in the lab. Maybe there are some formulations of compounds that would work, materials we just don’t know of yet.

People have also thought a carbon nanotube could be stronger than diamond. But that kind of strength is a ‘stretching’ strength and is not really suitable for cutting applications. Carbon nanotubes are rolled up sheets of graphene. But most of them are pretty short in terms of length. So far, it’s been difficult to make them even a few centimetres long without defects; I don’t know how they could’ve made these fibres [in the programme].

Matt, as the scientific adviser, were you happy with how the series turned out?

Kenzie: The writers of this show really know a lot about science. They’re very well read, and they think about things very carefully. They’re not just asking [me for advice] to make themselves feel better, they really think about things. The level of attention to detail that they showed was something that impressed me. I was not really expecting it, to be honest.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01272-5

These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

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China's true military spending in 2022 was likely worth $711 billion, or 'nearly equal' to the US military budget that year: US think tank

• A new report says China's $229 billion military budget in 2022 was actually equivalent to $711 billion.
• A similar figure was touted by lawmakers last year when they cited US intelligence estimates.
• The report, by think tank AEI, breaks down that figure to show where China's money is likely going to.

In June 2023, Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska warned Congress that China's military was catching up to America's faster than previously imagined.

The US intelligence community, the Republican senator said , estimated that Beijing spent an equivalent of $700 billion on its defense budget in 2022 — more than triple its reported topline of $229 billion.

Sullivan's legislative push to dig further into the matter came amid renewed interest in China's true military budget, with think tanks and observers running their own analyses of Beijing's coffers.

A new report published Monday by the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute seeks to break down how the US might have internally reached that $700 billion estimation for 2022.

The report's author, Mackenzie Eaglen, writes that the Chinese budget is worth about $711 billion when weighed against America's, slightly higher than the one quoted in June by Sullivan.

That makes Beijing's spending in 2022 "nearly equal" to the US defense budget of about $740 billion that year, wrote Eaglen, a senior fellow at AEI.

"Considering that the Pentagon has labeled China the 'pacing challenge,' this revelation should cause concern," Eaglen wrote.

She mostly pieced together the new figure by comparing older Chinese budget reports and spending breakdowns, extrapolating them onto the $229 billion Beijing announced.

That's because Chinese spending reports are kept tightly under wraps. Most US observers haven't been able to pin the $700 billion on hard evidence.

Understanding $711 billion

Notably, the $711 billion estimate listed by Eaglen doesn't mean that China is spending that exact amount of money on defense. Rather, it describes the purchasing power of its military budget compared to America's, especially considering lower wage and material costs in China.

Related stories

Based on a 2020 Chinese report to the United Nations , Eaglen wrote that China's 2022 military spending was likely divided into three major categories: equipment, training and maintenance, and personnel.

With purchasing power parity factored in, China likely spent the US equivalent of $135 billion instead of $85 billion on equipment and $121 billion instead of $76 billion on training and maintenance, the report said.

But the biggest jump comes from Eaglen's estimation of Chinese military wages, which typically aren't publicly recorded.

"Labor costs are demonstrably cheaper in China, where soldiers are paid just one-sixteenth the wage of a US Army infantryman," Eaglen wrote in an opinion piece for The Hill.

In her report, she compared the average wages of US and Chinese government workers and found that the former are paid 4.31 times as much as their counterparts in China.

Using that factor, Eaglen wrote that it's highly likely China's spending on personnel that year was worth $293 billion of US military spending.

Then there's research and development, which the US said China doesn't account for in its military budget announcements. Eaglen estimated that China spent about $45 billion on R&D, based on the country saying it spent that amount on research in "nondisclosed agencies."

The rest of the total budget comes from significant expenses listed by China as non-military, but ones that Eaglen argued should be considered defense spending.

She wrote that one such expense was $45 billion for maintaining the People's Armed Police, a paramilitary organization focused on internal security but tasked with bolstering the People's Liberation Army's ranks in times of crisis.

Another $45 billion was spent on retirement, military pensions, and demobilization, $2 billion on China's Coast Guard, and $21 billion on space forces — which Eaglen calculated for growth based on an official 2013 Chinese budget of $10.8 billion for space .

"Equal defense spending between the United States and China plays to Beijing's benefit," Eaglen wrote, noting that the US defense budget is spread across various theaters worldwide while China focuses on only one region.

The researcher called on the US to provide transparency on its findings about China's military spending power, citing concerns that the "American public is too often at ease in believing the US military remains ahead of all its competitors."

US military spending is also often cited as higher than the actual defense budget. Some estimates for 2023 are as high as $1.4 trillion when factoring in costs like veterans affairs spending, homeland security, security for international affairs, and interest accrued from debt.

Meanwhile, the US in March passed a bill allocating $825 billion to the American defense budget in 2024, the smallest proportion of its GDP since World War II. In the same month, China announced a military budget of $231 billion for the year.

Watch: China shows how it would attack Taiwan as tensions rise

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Morocco earthquake caused 0.24% economic loss, new research paper suggests

A l Haouz earthquake is expected to have moderate losses on the Moroccan economy, according to a recent research paper by think tank Policy Center for the New South.

In September 2023, a powerful earthquake struck several Moroccan provinces, tragically claiming the lives of nearly 3,000 people. A new research paper from the Policy Center for the New South (PCNS) assesses the economic impact of this catastrophe, suggesting moderate losses of around 0.24% of Morocco's entire economy.

The research investigates the financial weight of the earthquake and its recovery efforts. According to the April 30 survey, the earthquake will result in a 1.3% drop in Marrakech-Safi GRP and a 10.2% drop in economic activity in the Al-Haouz province, the areas most affected by the disaster.

«From these estimations, we can infer that the earthquake on September 8, 2023, was more of a human tragedy with moderate economic losses, especially at the macroeconomic level», wrote the researchers. They explained that this conclusion «is supported by the analysis of some high-frequency financial indicators, showing the resilient nature of the Moroccan economy following the natural disaster».

Relief plan analyzed

The research also examines the government's program, the «Program for Reconstruction and Rehabilitation of Affected Areas». This program allocates 120 billion MAD for short-term emergency aid to households, financial assistance for housing reconstruction, and medium to long-term infrastructure rebuilding and upgrading in the affected areas, as well as promoting economic activity in other High Atlas provinces.

Researchers assessed the two phases of the program. The first part focuses on immediate relief efforts, providing money to families for food and shelter and fixing roads and other infrastructure. The second part focuses on long-term improvements, including building better roads and schools, and creating jobs in farming and tourism.

«We assessed the economic impact of the recovery program through its two main pillars, while considering different hypotheses for the financing scheme of the second pillar, ranging from a new injection of money into the economy (debt) to a complete reallocation of investments from non-affected to affected areas», explained the source.

In their assessment, researchers suggest that based on «Morocco's commitment to maintaining macroeconomic stability, especially debt sustainability, and aligned with the Ministry of Finance's assessment that treasury debt is projected to decelerate starting from 2023, and to return to 2021 levels by 2025, the scenario that appears most probable for financing the second pillar (98 billion MAD) suggests a primary reliance on investment reallocation, rather than an increase in indebtedness».

Considering this scenario, the researchers believe the 120 billion MAD recovery plan will only have «a mild positive impact on growth at the national level», with an average increase of 0.03 percentage points over the period 2024-2028.

«For the High Atlas provinces, significant growth increases are expected due to the recovery plan, regardless of the financing scenario», signaled the researchers.

Finally, the researchers discuss a difficult choice the government faces : should they focus on helping the most affected areas catch up, even if it means taking money from wealthier areas? «Considering the policy intention to reduce regional disparities, and the necessity of assisting underdeveloped regions in catching up with the rest of the country's development stage, we might consider the need to prioritize equity over efficiency in such circumstances», the researchers concluded.

For the record, the Policy Center for the New South (PCNS) is a Moroccan think tank aiming to contribute to the improvement of economic and social public policies that challenge Morocco and the rest of Africa as integral parts of the global South.