Second-year TAM student, Sam Hart, recently attended a conference in Italy.
A Durham, North Carolina native, Sam graduated in three years, magna cum laude with dual Bachelor’s degrees in Political Science and History from North Carolina State University. He is now pursuing Master’s degrees in Political Science and European Studies through TAM. After the successful completion of his first year of TAM in Chapel Hill, Sam is now studying in Gothenburg, Sweden. Sam’s research interests include international relations and security, comparative politics, and public policy, and privately his passions include Wolfpack football, history, and his friends and family. He writes of his conference experience below.
NATO Workshop in Italy – October 2023:
With generous funding from the TransAtlantic Masters program, I was able to attend the Climate
Change & Security Workshop in La Specia, Italy, hosted by the NATO Science & Technology
Organization (STO) Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE). The three day
workshop offered invaluable presentations and contemporary research—both in data and
techniques—while simultaneously creating an environment conducive to open discussion. I was
particularly interested in attending this workshop because of my thesis topic on Arctic security,
hoping to join the broader discussion on the impacts of climate change on security structures. I
am delighted to affirm that this workshop was exceedingly beneficial in this regard, with a
plurality of speakers discussing the Arctic from a variety of angles, as well as several being
open to both impromptu and future-planned conversations and interviews—incredibly helpful for
my thesis writing. Given the opportunity I hope to attend this workshop again, but regardless I
am confident that I have made several invaluable connections from these three days—for now
and for life.
