Olive Coles graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania in 2023 with degrees in Russian and East European studies and political science. Her research explores how aesthetics, information, and collective memory are weaponized as instruments of power—focusing on Russian disinformation, hybrid warfare, and the application of emerging technologies (applied AI) to democratic resilience and the public good.
She spent the summer of 2025 in Ukraine at the Kyiv School of Economics, working on a Horizon Europe project furthering cultural heritage preservation and national security.
Olive has spent time in the renewable energy sector, working with developing U.S. carbon sequestration technologies, and researching civil society at the NGO level in Kyrgyzstan. At Penn, she was an undergraduate research fellow at the Wolf Center for Humanities and a research assistant at the Penn Identity and Conflict Lab. Upon graduating, she received the Luba Zinkowsky Friedman Fund Prize for Excellence in Russian Studies.
At Harvard, she was the Imperiia Project Innovation Fellow and an R.A. for the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures.
Last updated May 2026.
