Dr. Mansoor Ahmed is an Honorary Lecturer in the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific/Strategic and Defence Studies Centre. Previously, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for International Strategic Studies, Islamabad from November 2018 to May 2022. He is an alumnus of the Project on Managing the Atom/International Security Program at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, where he was a Stanton Nuclear Security Junior Faculty Fellow (2015-2016), a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow (2016-2018), and an Associate of the Project on Managing the Atom (2018-2019). In 2013, he was a Visiting Research Scholar at the Cooperative Monitoring Center, Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, N.M. and an Honorary Visiting Fellow with the Third Nuclear Age Project, the University of Leicester's Department of International Relations from 2021-2022. 

He received a PhD in International Relations in 2012, a MPhil in Defence and Strategic Studies in 2004, and an MSc in International Relations in 2001 from Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad where he worked as a Lecturer in the Department of Defence and Strategic Studies from 2011 to 2015. Before joining the academia, he was an Assistant and Deputy Director in the Department of the Auditor-General of Pakistan from July 2003 to January 2011.

Over the past decade, his research has been published by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, The Stimson Center, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, The U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA., and has appeared in The Journal of Political and Military Sociology, Regional Studies, CISS Insight, and SIRIUS – Zeitschrift für Strategische Analysen. 

He has been a regular commentator on Pakistani and South Asian nuclear and missile developments for Defense News and is the author of Pakistan’s Pathway to the Bomb: Ambitions, Politics and Rivalries (Georgetown University Press, 2022).

Dr. Ahmed is a 2021 alumnus of the Summer Workshop on the Analysis of Military Operations and Strategy (SWAMOS), Cornell University and was a member of the Beyond Nuclear Deterrence Working Group of the Harvard-MacArthur Research Network on Rethinking Nuclear Deterrence for 2022-2024.

He has also delivered invited talks at the E.U. Nonproliferation Consortium (2013), the Cooperative Monitoring Center at Sandia National Labs (2013), the Center for Global Security Research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (2013), the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, (2015-2018, 2022), the International School on Disarmanent and Research on Conflicts (ISODARCO), Italy (2019, 2023), and the International Institute for Strategic Studies London (2020).

Since 2011, Dr. Ahmed has participated in and contributed to several Track-2 dialogues, conferences, and crisis simulation/tabletop exercises on South Asian security, strategic stability, and nuclear issues organised by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey C.A., the Atlantic Council, the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) and the Ottawa Dialogue. 

PhD, MPhil, MSc (Quaid-i-Azam University)

• Fissile Materials and Nuclear Proliferation
• Pakistani, Indian, and Chinese Nuclear Programmes, Policies, and Postures 
• Strategic Stability and Arms Race Dynamics in Southern Asia
• Conventional Military Modernization 
• Arms Control and Disarmament