BOOK PRESENTATION – Warhead: How the Brain Shapes War and War Shapes the Brain
hosted by Professor
Eugene Finkel
Nicholas Wright
Affiliated Scholar, Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics, Georgetown University Medical Center; Non-Resident Fellow, Cognitive Technology, INSS
Nicholas Wright is an affiliated scholar at Georgetown University, Honorary Senior Research Fellow at University College London (UCL), Consultant at Intelligent Biology, and Adjunct Fellow (Non-Resident) at Washington D.C.'s Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Wright uses insights from neuroscience, behaviour and technology to understand competition and conflict.
His new book,
Warhead: How the brain shapes war and war shapes the brain, published in 2025 by Pan Macmillan (UK) and St. Martin's Press (US).
Wright has advised the Pentagon Joint Staff for over a decade. On artificial intelligence (AI) he advises Europe's largest tech company, SAP. DARPA used his definition of gray zone conflict for their recent AI programme on the gray zone.
Foreign Affairs chose his piece on AI for its Top 10 of 2018 on the net. He edited the book
Artificial Intelligence, China, Russia and Global Order (Air University Press, 2019), and co-edited
Human, Machine, War: How the Mind-Tech Nexus will Win Future Wars (Air University Press, 2025). He has collaborated with Peking University. He has led Track 1.5 dialogues, e.g., with the White House, UK Cabinet Office and Australian Prime Minister's office, as well as with the Australian and Canadian Government Chief Scientists.
He previously worked in nuclear policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington DC; used functional brain imaging at UCL and the London School of Economics; and was a neurology doctor in Oxford and London.
The Economist and
The New York Times covered his academic research. He has published in
Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, and appeared on the BBC and CNN.
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Wright has a medical degree from UCL, a BSc in Health Policy from Imperial College London, Membership of the Royal College of Physicians (UK), and an MSc in Neuroscience and a PhD in Neuroscience both from UCL.
