Elena Wicker

Elena Wicker is a Future Concept Developer at Army Futures Command under the Presidential Management Fellowship. Since June of 2023, she has also been a non-resident fellow at the U.S. Marine Corps University’s Brute Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfare.

Elena earned her Ph.D. in International Relations at Georgetown University in May 2022 during her 2021–2022 predoctoral fellowship at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation explores the strategic creation and use of jargon in the U.S. military and the past, present, and future of concepts, doctrine, and strategy. Her interdisciplinary and multi-method research combined archival research, interviews, and quantitative methods, including machine learning and natural language processing.

Concurrent with her doctoral research, Elena served as an adjunct researcher with the RAND Corporation, where she contributed to projects relating to intelligence, security cooperation, homeland security, and defense policy. Prior to her graduate studies, she served as an Intelligence Security Cooperation Officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency. She has completed internships in arms control treaty verification at the Department of State and worked for refugee aid projects in Jordan and the West Bank while studying advanced Arabic as a Boren Scholar. She holds an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University and a B.A. (magna cum laude) in Near Eastern Studies and Physics from Cornell University.