Sameer Lalwani is a Research Fellow with the American Strategy Program, a contributor to the popular political blog The Washington Note and is pursuing a Ph.D. in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As an MIT Presidential Fellow and a member of the Security Studies Program and the Program on Emerging Technologies, Mr. Lalwani studies great power intervention, civil-military relations, and national security decision making with a focus on Middle East and South Asian geopolitics.

Previously he was a Policy Analyst for New America's American Strategy Program and a Research Associate for the Bernard L. Schwartz Fellows Program. Mr. Lalwani has published in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, India West, and TPM Cafe. He holds a bachelor's degree in political science from University of California, Berkeley, where he was a research assistant to Professor Kiren Chaudhry, and has studied at the Heinz School of Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University.