Saraf Disha

Ph.D Candidate

Specializing in International Relations with a secondary concentration in Comparative Politics. She holds a Master of Public Policy from the University of Maryland, College Park, where she focused on international security and economic policy, and a BSc in Urban and Regional Planning from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.

Her research sits at the intersection of political violence, WMD governance, and great-power competition, with particular attention to how institutional weakness and strategic rivalry shape conflict outcomes across the Indo-Pacific. Trained in both quantitative and qualitative research methodology, she brings an unusually broad empirical toolkit — combining large-scale quantitative analysis, geospatial modeling, randomized controlled trials, and elite interviewing — developed across nearly a decade of fieldwork and policy-facing research.

Before joining UConn, Disha worked as a Research Scientist at Texas State University on cyber and infrastructure vulnerabilities, and as a Capstone Analyst at the U.S. State Department’s Office of China Coordination, where she designed a vulnerability index for U.S. military bases in Japan and briefed senior officials including former SecDef James Mattis and former NSA H.R. McMaster. Her earlier career spans roles at Innovations for Poverty Action, BRAC University, the UN Development Programme, and the University of Connecticut’s NCITE project (DHS), where she led large-scale field studies on refugee governance, conflict, and political economy across Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, and recruitment strategies by terrorist organizations.

Her research has been published across topics ranging from nuclear deterrence and biosecurity to Myanmar’s civil war and U.S.–China strategic competition. She is fluent in seven languages, including Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, and Bengali.

Outside academia, Disha is a classically trained dancer who finds her balance through cooking, hiking, road trip, and the quiet pleasure of meeting new people — an ambivert equally at home in the field and at the dinner table.