Monday, Nov. 17, to Friday, Nov. 21, Executive Director of the Andrew W. Marshall Foundation Melissa Flagg visited the College of William and Mary as a visiting fellow for the Global Research Institute. Flagg addressed undergraduates and participated in a series of talks, including a fireside chat with Vice Provost for Research Alyson Wilson and another with Director of The GeoTech Initiative Kate Carline '26.
For the past twenty years, GRI has served as a hub for student and faculty research on campus, though it has not had a permanent home. That will change in 2026 once the GRI hub, along with the Institute for Integrative Conservation and the Whole of Government Center of Excellence, moves into the newly renovated Robert M. Gates Hall on North Boundary Street.
According to GRI Director Mike Tierney, the upcoming move has breathed new life into the Institute and inspired him to lead its new visiting fellow tradition. Ideally, in the future, visiting fellows would stay on campus for one week at a time, conceding more time for personalized research experiences among students and faculty.
"In GRI 2.0, we will have visiting fellows, practitioners that come and are in residence at William and Mary for a week to work with students, to work with faculty and to engage with university leadership to think about how we can do more applied research at William and Mary," he said.
Tierney noted that the visiting fellow tradition, which will include a fireside chat, is only part of an even broader transformation of the College's research landscape.
"This is really the second in a series of conversations that the GRI is hosting about the future of the university," Tierney said. "The Global Research Institute is transforming itself into a research incubator and a research accelerator for the university."
Wilson, a statistician and expert on nuclear weapons with extensive experience in the applied research sector, sat down with Flagg, the current executive director of the Andrew W. Marshall Foundation and senior advisor to the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown, to discuss the shifting dynamic of federal funding, the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence and the role of research universities in the future.
The visit was Flagg's first to the College and offered an opportunity to engage directly with international relations scholars and students interested in her interdisciplinary work.
"I joined the Phage lab with [Chancellor Professor of Applied Science] Margaret Saha," Flagg said. "Last night, we had a dinner that actually brought people both from international relations and synthetic biology all having dinner together. It's been really incredible. It's really challenged me to be able to move between those topics and to pattern-match and see how they coexist and how they affect each other. And so it's given me maybe another opportunity to reflect on the nature of interdisciplinary as well."
While completing her doctoral degree in pharmaceutical chemistry, Flagg envisioned herself conducting pharmaceutical research in Panama. But after an unpleasant experience pursuing that opportunity, Flagg decided she wanted to strike out on a career in academia.
"I came back to Arizona," Flagg said. "I finished my Ph.D., obviously, but I also decided, 'I'm out. I'm done. I'm going to be a bartender in St. Thomas.' I have a friend who lives there. She's a pharmacist. She's going to help me get a job. I went to bartending school for a week. I was like, 'This is it. This is what I'm doing.'"
As fate would have it, one of her former undergraduate professors reached out, offering her a year of postdoctoral work. Eventually, she encouraged her to apply for a policy fellowship with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She would move to Washington, D.C. in 2001 to start in that capacity, with the goal of working on sustainable development in Africa and Latin America at the United States Department of State.
However, during the first week of her starting at the State Department, the Sept. 11 attacks took place.
"It was like, 'Well, we're not going to be working on sustainable development now,'" Flagg said.
Wilson opened the conversation by touching on the rapidly shifting relationship between the federal government and research universities, especially since the return of the Trump administration. In these shifts, she argued that the critical importance of scientific research within university settings has been uniquely challenged.
"I think it is a really interesting moment because we are clearly transitioning to something, but that future isn't written yet, right?" she said. "So we have a foot on either side of the fence, and you don't get a lot of rewards or incentives to be the one authoring the future in the current system. But you also don't want to be the person who didn't evolve fast enough."
At the State Department, Flagg said her supervisor disliked working with the military, which meant she was the one attending meetings with the armed forces. She explained how international science collaboration evolved in response to heightened national security concerns.
"Suddenly, science was really under siege by lots of the military and the intelligence community and the national security apparatus wanting to ban foreign scientists from entering the country and other things," Flagg said. "And there were a lot of real political problems where very prominent scientists from places like Brazil and Russia were being denied visas for the first time in decades."
To help address that public policy issue, Flagg sat in on countless meetings with the military and the intelligence community over two years, becoming an expert in those fields at the State Department.
Much to her surprise, Flagg eventually found herself working for the U.S. Navy, looking at the emerging technologies worldwide. In 2009, she became the director of technical intelligence for the U.S. Department of Defense. She would leave that role in 2013 to work as a resident scientist for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, where she helped identify researchers to receive grants to conduct STEM research.
Thinking she would stay in philanthropy, the Obama administration asked Flagg to return to government as a political appointee at the Department of Defense in 2015, where she would serve until the end of the administration as the deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Research.
"So I spent another 18 months in the Pentagon again, but really looking at kind of the same topics but from a leadership level," Flagg said. "So, really doing oversight of [science and technology] across all of the military."
Now at the Andrew W. Marshall Foundation, Flagg works to digitize -- using many tools, including AI -- Andrew W. Marshall's papers from his time at the RAND Corporation, the American nonprofit security think tank. Marshall served as the inaugural director of the Office of Net Assessment at the Defense Department from 1973 to 2015, which U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth abolished and then restored earlier this year.
Flagg did not find the move concerning as, historically, defense secretaries have varied dramatically in which offices they have kept operational.
During the fireside chat, Flagg expanded on the necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration rather than isolation in the AI era, a perspective her recent work has put into focus.
"What I hate is when I see the liberal arts and science pitted against each other, because it's so unhealthy, and I feel like we turn this wheel and we go way too far to one side and isolate, and they fight with each other, and then you turn it back too far the other way, and they fight with each other, and I will just say, I think one, ironic thing that is going to help this is actually AI," she said.
She added that emerging AI technology may offer a surprising bridge between the two seemingly contrary areas of interest.
"And it's going to make so much more space for sociologists and anthropologists and historians and all the sort of richness of the humanities to come into AI to help us understand what it is that makes us human," Flagg said.
As for her advice to students, Flagg said they should remain open to the possibility of not being able to plan their whole lives straight out of graduation, citing the fact that many careers today did not exist when she finished school. Secondly, students should be able to bring communicative skills to whatever career they choose, but they should not exclusively bill themselves as purely communicators or translators. Finally, she encouraged students to be grounded in a field of knowledge they can feel confident in.
"You need to be able to engage people with a fundamentally different set of building blocks with genuine inquisitiveness," Flagg said.
The first thing Flagg does when meeting people from a different academic background, Flagg said, is to take into account their unique perspectives.
"I think we are all pixels on a disco ball, right?" Flagg said. "And some of us are looking up at the ceiling, and we think the world is white ceiling tiles. And some of us are looking down at the floor, and we think it's gray floor and green chairs. And some of us are pointed out to the side, and we're seeing the white wall and the newspaper, and whatever as we spin, and we're all arguing with each other because what we are seeing is objectively and measurably true to us, and yet they're radically different."
Flagg emphasized the need to approach others to contextualize their understanding of the world.
"Appreciating that every perspective needs to exist in the world and finding a way to meet that discomfort with the fact that somebody has a fundamentally different worldview than you with empathy and curiosity," Flagg said.
For many students, the fireside chat connected directly to their coursework. Charlotte Zoeller-McCarthy '27, who is part of the American Statecraft Global Scholars cohort, had the opportunity to get dinner with Flagg and other students on the prior Monday night.
Flagg's empathetic approach to problem-solving and teamwork struck a chord with Zoeller-McCarthy, something she hopes to apply to her own career.
"I really liked what she said about how you have to meet people where they are at with the different building blocks of their academic or personal background in order to, kind of, come to a collaborative answer," Zoeller-McCarthy said.
Kevin Kinsella '27, who works on research communications at the GRI, reflected on the center's recent guest speakers series and the takeaways he has drawn from them.
"There are so many great speakers that come through here," Kinsella said. "I mean, we hosted Francis Fukuyama, David Sanger, Jill Doherty ... and I feel like I always learn something that I never expected to learn at one of these talks, or there's something they say that really sparks my interest."