John R. Emery is an Assistant Professor of International Security in the department of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He is the co-director of OU's Center for Security and Emerging Technologies. His research focuses on issues of technology in international relations, AI ethics, security studies, wargaming, ethics of war, and nuclear history. He is a member of the 2021-2024 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Project on Nuclear Issues (PONI) Mid-Career Cadre, which brings together nuclear experts from technical, policy, academic, and military backgrounds. Previously, Dr. Emery was a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Irvine where he was also a Tobis Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality. In the 2017-2018 academic year he was a part of a National Science Foundation EAGER grant that brought together an interdisciplinary research group to assess the impact of technological innovations in AI, Big Data, and algorithms on law and the social sciences.
He has published widely in edited volumes and academic journals, including Ethics & International Affairs, Texas National Security Review, Critical Military Studies, Peace Review,Political Psychology, and Law & Policy. His research during the 2020-2021 academic year at CISAC on ethics and 1950s nuclear wargaming at the RAND Corporation was the runner-up winner of the Janne Nolan Prize for the best article on national security and international affairs, presented by Johns Hopkins SAIS Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, in collaboration with CSIS. As a Tobis Fellow at UC Irvine, he completed an article entitled “Probabilities Toward Death” that analyzed the rise of collateral damage estimation algorithms and the impact of human-machine interactions on ethics of due care in U.S. warfare.