Lucas Risinger graduated with highest distinction and honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2021, where he studied economics, Russian, and mathematics. Lucas’s work and research have centered around poverty and economic development, including an undergraduate honors thesis investigating the economic externalities of welfare receipt, and a summer working at an international impact investment fund in Tbilisi, Georgia. Lucas studied in Moscow in 2019 and during the 2021-2022 academic year at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where he continued his Russian studies with a Boren Award. At the Davis Center, he was a research assistant with the Negotiation Task Force.