Ömer Özkan
Ömer E. Özkan is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Cincinnati. His research explores military effectiveness, the impact of emerging technologies on security and procurement, and the strategic use of unmanned systems in modern warfare. His current work examines the political dimensions of military procurement, with a particular focus on the role of non-material factors in shaping the selection of defense systems. His research has been published in outlets such as Small Wars & Insurgencies and the RUSI Journal.

Pascal Vennesson
Pascal Vennesson is Senior Fellow and Head of Research at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University Singapore and Professor of Political Science at Paris-Panthéon-Assas University (on leave). His research and teaching lie at the intersection of the fields of strategic studies and military history. As an awardee of a General and Mrs. Matthew B. Ridgway Research Grant, he will work on his book project, Intuition and War: Command Decisions and Military Effectiveness. In this project he investigates why the command intuition of generals lead to battlefield success in some cases, but prove disastrous in others.

Savannah Scott
Savannah Scott is a history PhD student at George Mason University. Her areas of focus include 20th century America, digital methods, and war and society. Currently, she is researching her dissertation tentatively titled "Environmental Culture in the Army, 1960-1990." The project explores how the broader environmental turn in American culture manifested in the Army, and how this contributed to the Army's relationship with nature. The dissertation will analyze outdoor recreation in the Army, dependent scouting, and environmental messaging in print publications. Before attending George Mason, she received her B.A. in History from Bridgewater College.

Brian Hayashi
Brian Masaru Hayashi is a Professor in History, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio. Before Kent, he taught at Yale University and Kyoto University. He is an award-winning author of three books, For the Sake of Our Japanese Brethren: Assimilation, Nationalism, and Protestantism among the Japanese of Los Angeles, 1895-1942 (Stanford Univ. Press, 1995); Democratizing the Enemy: The Japanese American Internment (Princeton University Press, 2004); and Asian American Spies: How Asian Americans Helped Win the Allied Victory (Oxford University Press, June 2021). His next book focuses on the anti-Asian racialist outlook tentatively entitled, The Yellow Peril Answer.

Heather Stur
Heather Marie Stur, Ph.D., is professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi and senior fellow in the Dale Center for the Study of War & Society. She is author of four books, including most recently 21 Days to Baghdad: General Buford Blount and the 3rd Infantry Division in the Iraq War (Osprey 2023). Stur’s current research, “Women’s Service in the U.S. Army from Grenada to Iraq,” explores roles of servicewomen in the Army since gender integration, from paratroopers with the 118th Military Police Company (Airborne) in Operation Urgent Fury to Female Engagement Teams in the Global War in Terror.

Meaghan McClure
Meaghan McClure is a doctoral student in Modern European History at Texas A&M University, studying surrender in the German military (Wehrmacht) from 1943-1945. During her time at USAHEC, she will investigate accounts of U.S. Army Units which encountered capitulating elements of the German Armed Forces during the final two years of the war. Her chief aim is to understand German large and small-scale surrenders as not only ritual events, but also as moments of transcultural interaction between erstwhile enemies. Meaghan’s dissertation project is tentatively titled, “The Final Act: Surrender in the Wehrmacht, 1943-1945.”

Rachel Gross
Rachel S. Gross is a historian of the modern United States. As a Ridgway Fellow, she will be researching the history of U.S. military surplus disposal after World War II. She is the author of Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America (Yale University Press, 2024) and co-editor of Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America’s Biggest Retail Stores (University of Wyoming Press, 2024). She is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado Denver where she teaches U.S. gender, business, and public history. The NEH and the Mellon Foundation have supported her projects on the history of displacement and community resistance on the Auraria campus in Denver. Her collaborative work includes walking tours, digital history projects, and museum exhibits..