Adviser: Ambassador Elizabeth Richard, ISD Senior State Department Fellow; US Ambassador to Lebanon (2016-20)

Topic: Countering Iranian-Backed Armed Forces: A New Theory of Success

Gia is a candidate in the Master of Science in Foreign Service (MSFS) Program and will be researching a new U.S. strategy to counter Iranian-backed armed groups in the Middle East. As an undergraduate at Tufts University, Gia assisted in designing a UN survey to measure governance in post-revolutionary Libya and spent a summer working in Jordan collecting data from Syria. She then graduated with a B.A. in International Relations and Anthropology in 2016 and conducted field research on entrepreneurship in Morocco. In September 2016, Gia moved to Jordan where she was an analyst for the U.S. Military before beginning work supporting  the Independent Election Commission of Jordan (IEC). At the IEC, she helped run Jordanian national elections in 2017 and provided research for EU democracy support to Afghanistan’s 2018 parliamentary elections. Gia has served as a Fellow with the U.S. Department of State researching SDG 16 in Indonesia, and as an international observer to Kazakhstan’s Presidential Elections in 2019. Gia is currently the Egypt and Eritrea Researcher at ACLED, where she collects data on political violence and tracks ISIL activities in North Sinai.