Dr Wendy He

Network member

Post-doctoral Fellow · College of Fellows, University of Tübingen · Germany

Wendy He is an interdisciplinary scholar of international relations, specialising in U.S.-China relations, strategic studies, and political psychology. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She is currently a Global Encounters Fellow at the University of Tübingen’s College of Fellows and a Research Fellow with the Military Studies Programme at RSIS. Previously, she was a Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow in Grand Strategy at the Notre Dame International Security Center, University of Notre Dame, and a visiting researcher at National Taiwan University and the University of Washington. Her research examines how cognitive and social psychological dynamics shape strategic judgment in war and crisis decision-making. Her book project, The Confidence Trap, develops a theory of how leaders and advisers assess the credibility of military threats, showing how confidence can enable decisive leadership while also distorting advice-seeking, threat assessment, and strategic judgment. This research agenda has been recognised by the International Studies Association’s Carl Beck Award in 2026 and the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society Graduate Student Paper Award in 2025.