Cole Griffiths is a first-year MPP student at the Jackson School of Global Affairs, interested in leveraging emerging technologies to promote human security and impacting new paradigms in civilian harm mitigation, international legal compliance, satellite policy, and security in the Asia-Pacific region. At Jackson, he hopes to synthesize international law, policy analysis, and geospatial data science to shape humanitarian policy in the digital age.
Prior to Yale, Cole primarily worked on issues pertaining to national security policy. He was a research assistant with the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, where he supported research into the ethics of war, nuclear weapons policy, and American opinion on the use of force.
Born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, Cole received his bachelor's degree with distinction in political science from Stanford, with honors in international security. His senior thesis used natural language processing to conduct an original analysis of State Department human rights reports, examining their intersection with ethical U.S. military aid policy. While at Stanford, Cole was an inaugural Hoover Student Fellow supporting research on American intelligence and technological competition. He also interned for a State Department initiative mapping developing and disaster-stricken areas to support U.S. foreign aid initiatives.