Anna Pechenkina

About Me:

I am a third year PhD student in Political Science at Penn State, majoring in International Relations with first minor in Methodology. States regularly attempt to manage conflicts with varying degree of success. Despite the importance of conflict management as a foreign policy instrument, academics have not answered fully what makes some attempts at shortening wars and lengthening peace more likely to succeed than others. I want to understand how exactly outside actors may manipulate uncertainty between belligerents and thus influence in-war and post-war interactions. Methodologically, I combine agent-based modeling and statistical testing to further my inferences about conflict management.

Interests and Expectations

• fundamentally the problems of international politics that interest me are that of cooperation. specifically, how institutions and other agents affect the success/failure of cooperation. I hope to find people from other disciplines who are interested in similar questions to gain (and share?) insights from other disciplines.
• meeting a lot of people who use CAS is exciting to me by definition, since Political Science is still scarce on using complex simulation models. thus, exchanging ideas, learning and working with this group of people is my major positive expectation.

Expertise

• thinking about international relations
• Java, RepastJ, Perl
• applied statistics

A minor expectation on top of what's mentioned above...

...if anyone uses Repast Symphony, please let me know, i d like some help on converting my projects from RepastJ to RepastS.