Laura Luca

Laura Luca is a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory's Center for National Security and International Studies (CNSIS). She recently completed her Ph.D. in Political Science at UCLA. Her research examines how states use strategic communication to manage the core trade-offs of international security: inducing burden-sharing from allies without weakening deterrence, regulating new weapons while preserving strategic advantage, and advancing technologically without triggering arms races. Her dissertation combines formal game-theoretic modeling, archival research, and computational text analysis, including machine learning and large language models.

Previously, Laura worked at the European External Action Service in Brussels on multilateral affairs, served as a diplomat at the European Union Delegation to Iceland, and covered disarmament affairs at Romania's Mission to the UN Office in Geneva, including the Conference on Disarmament (CD) and the CCW's Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS). She was a 2025–26 Hans J. Morgenthau Predoctoral Fellow at the O'Brien Notre Dame International Security Center and a Nuclear Scholar with the Project on Nuclear Issues (PONI) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Laura holds a master's in International Relations/Political Science from the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) and a bachelor's in Economics and Political Science from UCLA.