Jason Blessing

DAAD Post-Doctoral Fellow

 

Dr. Jason Blessing is a DAAD Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). His research focuses on the development of cyber forces across NATO member countries, the transatlantic gap in military innovation, and emerging strategic challenges for NATO and its members. His areas of expertise are: cyber conflict; NATO and transatlantic security; military innovation and implementation; U.S. security and foreign policy; Estonian and Baltic security.

Dr. Blessing earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, where he defended his dissertation entitled “The Diffusion of Cyber Forces: Military Innovation and the Dynamic Implementation of Cyber Force Structure.” He has previously received his M.A. in Political Science from Virginia Tech and his B.A. in Government from The College of William and Mary.

Dr. Blessing’s commitment to high-quality, policy-relevant research has received recognition from the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington, DC, where he was selected as a USIP-Minerva Peace and Security Scholar, predoctoral position funded jointly by USIP and the U.S. Department of Defense’s Minerva Initiative. Dr. Blessing is also an alumnus of the International Policy Scholars Consortium and Network (IPSCON) hosted by the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Prior to graduate school, Dr. Blessing was a licensed Fraud Operations Analyst at E*TRADE Financial Corporation, where he identified and resolved cases of financial fraud based on technical compromise data and client behavioral patterns to mitigate risk and corporate losses.