Angela (Angel) O’Mahony is Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and a senior political scientist with the RAND Corporation.
As Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs, Angel has been responsible for leading the implementation of a major redesign of the Pardee RAND’s academic program while simultaneously managing the pivot to online and hybrid instruction during Covid-19. Prior to taking on the Assistant Dean position, she led the development of the academic content of the Pardee RAND program redesign. She has been a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School since 2014, supervising PhD students and teaching courses on policy making in complex environments and international security.
As a senior political scientist at RAND, Angel has led numerous research projects, including projects on security cooperation and defense posture, forecasting future conflict trends, assessing multinational interoperability, and projecting public support for terrorism. Methodologically, she has led work on computational social-behavioral modelling for complex environments and uncertainty-sensitive approach to understanding decision making. Other projects include studies examining the national security implications of virtual currency and the integration of women into special operations forces. She was the inaugural winner of RAND’s Innovation Award in 2015 for her work on incorporating social media in public policy analysis.
Angel has published multiple reports and articles on modeling complex social systems, including recently co-editing Social-Behavioral Modeling for Complex Systems, a volume that grew out of DARPA-funded RAND research, and co-editing a special issue of the Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation. She has also published a dozen articles in top political science and international relations journals, including articles examining the implications of international political and economic scrutiny on governments’ decision making, the causes and consequences of transnational political behavior, and modeling complex social systems.
Prior to joining RAND in 2011, Angel was an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, where she taught courses on international political economy and economic statecraft. She was also previously a Visiting Researcher with the International Economic Analysis Division of the Bank of England. A native Angelena, she received her B.A. in economics and political science from the University of California, Los Angeles and her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, San Diego.
Angela O'Mahony 