About Me

PNW spirit, DC vibes, Global citizen

Mina Pollmann is an associate political scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT, and her BS in Foreign Service from Georgetown University. Her research interests focus on Japan’s security and diplomacy, the U.S.-Japan alliance, U.S. foreign policy in the Indo-Pacific, alliance politics, the domestic and local politics of alliance management, and security cooperation. She is originally from Washington state, and has prior work experience with the DC bureau of a Japanese TV broadcaster and a DC-based risk intelligence startup. During her PhD, she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Social Science, and a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She has lived abroad in Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, and has native-level fluency in English and Japanese.