CAMBRIDGE, MA—The MIT Center for International Studies is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Eric Heginbotham, one of this country's foremost political-military analysts of East Asia, to the post of principal research scientist.

Heginbotham comes to MIT from the RAND Corporation, where he was a senior political scientist for ten years. He earned his PhD at MIT in 2002, winning the Lucian Pye Award for the best doctoral dissertation in the Department of Political Science that year, and has authored or co-authored numerous influential studies, including the U.S.-China Military Scorecard, just released by the RAND Corporation, and Chinese and Indian Strategic Behavior: Growing Power and Alarm, published by Cambridge University Press in 2012. He has also been a leading analyst of Japanese grand strategy. His appointment is supported by a generous gift to endowment received earlier this year from the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Richard J. Samuels, Ford International Professor of Political Science and director of CIS welcomes the appointment, declaring, "I have no doubt that Eric Heginbotham will continue to raise the bar for the study of Japanese foreign policy and for the understanding international security in the Asia-Pacific region, areas in which CIS and its Security Studies Program are already world leaders."