Mariana Budjeryn

Mariana Budjeryn is a senior researcher with the Center for Nuclear Security Policy at MIT’s Security Studies Program. She is the author of “Inheriting the Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023) and a winner of the 2024 William E. Colby Military Writers’ Award, the first female in the award’s 25-year history. Formerly, she held appointments as senior research associate with the Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at MTA, a fellow at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and as a visiting professor at Tufts University and Peace Research Institute Frankfurt.

Mariana has contributed research on the international nonproliferation regime, arms control, nuclear crises, and post-Soviet nuclear history. Her current research project focuses on nuclear safety and security risks to civilian nuclear reactors in armed conflict. Mariana is a member of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academies of Sciences and a senior nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is also one of the architects and a member of the Executive Board of ACONA, Arms Control Negotiations Academy, an immersive course in arms control history, technology, and negotiations skills.

Mariana’s research and analytical contributions appeared in the Journal of Cold War Studies, Nonproliferation Review, Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, War on the Rocks, Arms Control Today, and in the publications of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars where she was a fellow with the Global Europe Program.

Mariana holds a doctorate in political science, a master’s in international relations from Central European University (formerly) in Budapest, Hungary, and a bachelor’s in political science from the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine.

Affiliations:

• National Academy of Science, Committee on Arms Control and International Security, member
• Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, History and Public Policy Program, global fellow
• Arms Control Negotiation Academy, member of curriculum development group
• Nuclear Policy Education Center, member of the Board of Advisors
• Highly NRiched, contributor and mentor