Dr. Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado

Senior Adjunct Fellow

Expertise: Cuba, Latin America, U.S. Foreign Policy, International Development, National Security, Intelligence

Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado, PhD., was named Assistant Vice Chancellor of Student Success at the University of Nebraska Omaha in October 2014. He has served as the chief student affairs officer with oversight of diversity, inclusion and equity issues on campus. This includes the divisions of Veterans and Military Affairs, Multicultural Affairs, Gender and Sexuality Resources. He has been instrumental in the creation of scholarship and pathway programs at UNO serving first–generation college students and other under-represented groups.

He is a Professor of Political Science, with an emphasis on U.S. Foreign Policy, International Development, National Security and Intelligence. He is the former Treasurer of the American Political Science Association, served as the Interim Director for the UNO Office of Latino and Latin American Studies (OLLAS), and is a Faculty Associate with the University of Georgia’s Center for International Trade and Security. He was the past Director of the UNO Intelligence Community Center for Academic Excellence Program under the auspices of the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Dr. Benjamin-Alvarado also serves on the Boards of the Nebraska Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (Chair), Humanities Nebraska Foundation, Project Harmony – Connections, Boys Town, and the Salvation Army Executive Council.

Since 1992, he has visited Cuba 36 times for field research on energy and economic development and has conducted interviews with a number of senior government officials in Cuba’s energy and related agencies. He has led numerous people to people exchanges for groups from across the United States. He has served as a technical advisor to a number of US delegations to Cuba and Latin America on energy development, national security and strategic (nonproliferation) trade issues and regularly speaks on these issues in Washington, D.C. and across the nation. He is also a Senior Economic Energy Advisor with Give Global Energy.

He has published numerous articles, monographs, book chapters and commentaries on these subjects in newspapers, scholarly and policy journals including the Journal of Political Science Education, The Political Science Quarterly, The Nonproliferation Review, Cuba in Transition, and Yaderni Kontrol (Russia). In 2012, he edited Cuba’s Energy Future: Strategic Approaches to Cooperation with the Brookings Institution Press. He is also the author of Power to the People: Energy and the Cuban Nuclear Program (Routledge, Inc., 2000). Most recently, he was a contributor to The Cuba-U.S. Bilateral Relationship: New Pathways and Policy Choices (Oxford University Press, 2019). A native of California, He received his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 1997, and M.A. from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS) at Monterey in 1992. He also attended University of California Santa Barbara, UCLA, and Harvard University.