Lucas Risinger graduated from the Davis Center's REECA Program in 2024, three years after earning his bachelor's degree with highest distinction and honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 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.