Cheyenne Tretter

Cheyenne Tretter is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Columbia University and an associate with the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Her research interests include nuclear weapons, military activities in the space domain, and arms racing. Her dissertation, "Private Arms, Public Consequences: Rethinking Arms Competition and War in the Age of U.S. Defense Industry Privatization", analyzes how the post–Cold War transformation of the U.S. defense industry affects the dynamics of global arms racing and the connection between arms racing and war. 

At Columbia, Cheyenne was a Weatherhead East Asian Institute Fellow from 2020–2021. From 2023–2025, she worked at the Rand Corporation as a summer associate and adjunct researcher, where her work has explored Russian thinking on the military use of space, the evolving use of space in the Russo-Ukrainian war, and adversary perspectives on the use of Unmanned Aerial Systems in recent and future conflicts.