Dr. Togzhan Kassenova is a Washington, DC-based senior fellow with the Center for Policy Research at the University at Albany, SUNY, and a nonresident fellow with the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Dr. Kassenova is an expert on nuclear politics, WMD nonproliferation, and financial crime prevention. She currently works on issues related to proliferation financing controls, exploring ways to minimize the access of proliferators to the global financial system. In the past few years, she has developed and led training workshops on sanctions implementation and proliferation financing for the governments and private financial sector in dozens of countries.

From 2011 to 2015, Dr. Kassenova served on the UN Secretary General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters. Dr. Kassenova is the author of the award-winning Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb (Stanford University Press, 2022), Brazil’s Nuclear Kaleidoscope: an Evolving Identity (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2014), and From Antagonism to Partnership: The Uneasy Path of the U.S.-Russian Cooperative Threat Reduction (ibidem Press, 2007). 

Dr. Kassenova holds a BA in International Relations from Almaty State University, an MA in Euro-Asian Studies from the University of Reading, a Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Leeds, and an MA in Financial Integrity from Case Western Reserve University.