Matthew Connelly is the director of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge and a professor of international and global history at Columbia. From 2016-2023, he was co-director of Columbia’s social science research center, the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy. Previously, from 2009-2013, Connelly directed the Hertog Global Strategy Initiative, a research program on the history and future of planetary threats, including nuclear war, pandemics, and climate change. Since then, Connelly has been the principal investigator of History Lab, a project that uses data science to analyze state secrecy, with a focus on intelligence, surveillance, and weapons of mass destruction. Connelly has taught courses on “The History and Future of Pandemic Threats and Global Public Health,” “The History of the End of the World,” and “The Future as History.” He has frequently co-taught and co-authored articles with leading experts on pandemics, nuclear weapons, climate change, and religious violence. His publications include A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era, which won five prizes, Fatal Misconception, The Struggle to Control World Population, an Economist and Financial Times book of the year, and The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secrets, which was published in February by Random House. Connelly received his B.A. from Columbia in 1990 after spending a year reading history at Cambridge, and went on to earn his Ph.D. from Yale in 1997. Since then, he has been a professor at the University of Michigan and the London School of Economics, and has also held visiting positions at the University of Oslo, the University of Sydney, the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, and the Fundação Getulio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro. Connelly has written research articles in Nature-Human Behaviour, the Annals of Applied Statistics, Comparative Studies in Society and History, The International Journal of Middle East Studies, The American Historical Review, The Review française d’histoire d’Outre-mer, the Journal of Global History, and Past & Present. He has also provided commentary on international affairs for The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and Le Monde, and has hosted documentaries for BBC Radio.