Leyatt Betre is an independent researcher whose work broadly investigates the political, economic, and ideological consequences of state-science entanglements in the nuclear age. She completed her PhD in Security Studies at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs in August 2022. Leyatt has held predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowship appointments, respectively, with Harvard University’s Managing the Atom Project and Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. She received her SB degree in Physics and Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she conducted research in both the Security Studies Program and the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.
Research Interests
Leyatt's doctoral dissertation, “The Production of Arms and Influence: Weapons, Diplomacy, and the Technopolitics of Nuclear Strategy” traced the formation of a robust pro-R&D consensus within the U.S. military to early post-World War II efforts by scientists to regularize Navy support for basic research by first cultivating, amid intense opposition, a service-wide commitment to undersea warfare and to the deployment of nuclear weapons systems aboard naval platforms. Her continuing research in this vein explores the long-term implications of this history for the evolution of federal funding priorities in science and technology and accompanying developments pertaining to the reorganization of labor, industry, and expertise in post-Cold War America.
Leyatt's current research interests center around the post-World War II history and political economy of knowledge production in the United States, its consequences for the global movements of capital, labor, and scientific and industrial capacity that unfolded over the course of the Cold War and in the decades following the breakup of the Soviet Union, as well as the historical and present-day efforts of the countries of the Global South to democratize international political and financial institutions. She is particularly interested in the growing contemporary push, spearheaded by the BRICS+ countries, for regional economic integration and the de-dollarization of global trade, and the potentially far-reaching implications of this transformation for the conduct of international affairs.
Teaching
Assistant in Instruction (AI), Science and Global Security: From Nuclear Weapons to Cyberwarfare and Artificial Intelligence (SPI/MAE 353, Spring 2019 and Spring 2020). This course provides students with a basic technical understanding of some of the critical technologies that are relevant to national and global security and will equip students with the skills to better assess the challenge of developing effective policies to manage such technologies. Case studies include nuclear weapons and their proliferation, nuclear and radiological terrorism, space weapons, biosecurity and cyberwarfare.