About Me

Dr. Mina Pollmann was most recently a Presidential Management Fellow with the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Japanese Affairs, serving as a Foreign Affairs Officer on the Economics Team. Previous professional experiences include working as an Associate Political Scientist with the Defense and Political Science Department at the RAND Corporation and News Producer for the Washington, DC Bureau of TV Tokyo.

Dr. Pollmann holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT (qualifications: international relations, comparative politics, affiliation: Security Studies Program), and a B.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University (major: international politics, concentration: foreign policy and policy processes). Her doctoral dissertation examined the Political Origins of Alliances using historical cases from Japan. She was awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to support her dissertation research, and she held visiting research appointments with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and University of Tokyo’s Institute of Social Science. She started conducting research on Japanese politics and international security, and studied abroad at the University of Oxford, in her undergraduate years.

Dr. Pollmann’s research interests are Japan’s security and diplomacy, the U.S.-Japan alliance, alliance politics, and Indo-Pacific security. She writes on these topics regularly for The Diplomat.

She is based in Haarlem, the Netherlands, and is currently looking for a Japan- and/or international security-related role for her next step. Dr. Pollmann has native-level fluency in English and Japanese and is beginning to learn Dutch.

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