A Fulbright Year in Munich

Posted on August 13, 2026 by Alyssa Columbus in Conferences, Fulbright Germany, Reflections, Research

I came to Munich with my school backpack, a small cooler, and one checked suitcase, trusting that whatever else I needed I’d find once I got here. Ten months later, at the close of the grant period, I had two dissertation chapters, a software package, a set of collaborators I hope to keep working with, along with a broader sense of what all I’m able to embark upon and accomplish.

The 2025/2026 Fulbright Germany cohort at orientation, right at the start of the year.

The Work I Came To Do

What was the problem I came to Munich to work on? My Fulbright project, “Managing the Multiplicity of Analysis Strategies for Robust Research Outcomes,” was hosted by Dr. Sabine Hoffmann at the Institut für Statistik at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU Munich), and it starts from something that’s easy to state and harder to parse and work out, which is that when several competent analysts are handed the same dataset and the same question, they rarely produce the same answer. Each of them has to decide how to define the exposure and the outcome, which confounders to adjust for, how to handle missing data and ambiguous events, and which model to fit, so that a single question corresponds to a whole space of defensible analyses rather than to one. The variability on its own would be tolerable (and interesting in its own right!); what does the damage is variability combined with reporting only the specification that produced the most publishable result, which inflates confidence and helps explain why so many findings don’t replicate.

Working in Dr. Hoffmann’s group with two German population-based cohorts and one running question about cardiovascular risk, the year produced four things: a tutorial for applied epidemiologists, written with a generous group of collaborators who taught me a great deal along the way; a methodological framework that grew out of a gap I noticed while writing that tutorial and that now forms a chapter of my dissertation; a co-authored paper led by a fellow student, currently under review; and the forkflow R package with its companion open-access book.

Fourteen Countries, Ten Venues

Outside the Palace of Nations in Geneva, before my presentation.

How far does a methodological question travel once you carry it around a continent? I presented at ten venues across Europe during the grant period and visited fourteen countries over the course of the year, namely: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Although I enjoyed all of my travels, my conference stops in Geneva, Switzerland (where I presented at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research Global Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Security and Ethics, at the Palace of Nations) and in Madrid/Alcalá de Henares, Spain (where I spoke at the first European University Alliance for Global Health (EUGLOH) Conference on Pedagogical Development and chaired a session) were the most memorable and intellectually stimulating. The other academic talks and posters took me across the rest of the continent on other adventures, and one of them was a guest lecture on the other side of Munich, which felt like the most brief (yet one of the most beautiful) set of connecting train rides the whole year.

*Tulips at Keukenhof, a highlight of the Netherlands.*

Most of these trips I made alone, into venues and cities where I knew absolutely no one, and I found that these experiences changed me at least as much as the papers did. An international career used to be something I admired in other people, and it’s now something I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to start.

The Fulbright European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization Seminar

The Fulbright EU-NATO Seminar cohort at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, February 2026.

What changes when you get to sit inside an institution you’ve only read about? The Fulbright European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (EU-NATO) Seminar ran from 24 to 28 February 2026 and answered that question five days in a row. We began in Luxembourg with an introduction to the European Union and a reception at the U.S. Embassy, and the following morning we were briefed on a pending case at the Court of Justice of the European Union and then sat in on the hearing itself, after which the President of the Court and a judge of the General Court joined us for lunch and spoke about how the Court reasons with a generosity that made the day even more extraordinary than it already was.

The rest of the week in Brussels moved through the European Commission, the European Parliament, NATO Headquarters, and the U.S. Missions to both the European Union and NATO. This densely informative week enabled me to see where (in terms of physical locations I got to visit and bureaucratic practices I got to tangibly learn about) research I have contributed to has been cited and used in policy, and to learn the mechanisms by which that happened. Following a citation trail from an academic paper into a recommendation and then into something a government does was gamechanging for how I think about my own work in trustworthy data science, and it made the case for reporting analytic choices carefully and reproducibly feel much less abstract, since somebody downstream is relying on a single number that could just as defensibly have been several.

The seminar ended over dinner near the historic (and gorgeous!) Grand Place. I am grateful to Jace Jasper for organizing the entire week so thoughtfully, and to Fulbright Germany for selecting me as one of just a handful of delegates from our commission’s grantees to attend.

Transatlantic Classroom and Community Engagement

With the Amerikahaus München team, whose Ask an American program sent me into German classrooms.

Some of the most satisfying hours of the year had nothing to do with statistics. Through the Ask an American program at Amerikahaus München I visited German classrooms to answer questions about life in the United States, including an English lesson with class 8a at the Friedrich-List-Gymnasium in Gemünden, where I talked about my family, growing up in California, school, university, and my hobbies. The school very kindly wrote about the visit here: „Ask an American“ – eine etwas andere Englischstunde in der 8a.

I also spent the year as a Fulbright Traveler with Reach the World, connecting a high school German classroom in the United States to my research and my life in Germany, and I was given the distinction of Best Traveler-Educator Collaboration in early spring for that work. The journal is public and can be read here: Alyssa’s Journey to Germany.

The rest of the year outside the office included volunteering at the Munich Security Conference, pro bono artificial intelligence engineering with the Technical University of Munich Social Artificial Intelligence Club for clients including United Nations Women and Initiativgruppe e.V., a Bavarian folk dance course through the university sports center, and open swimming at the Olympiaschwimmhalle. I also got lucky enough to snag the very last ticket to hear Werner Herzog speak in person (and show a movie!) at the film museum in the center of Munich and experience an evening I could not have talked my way into anywhere else.

Fulbright Germany Thanksgiving, November 2025.

What Germany Turned Out To Be

Marienplatz in spring, with the Neues Rathaus behind the tulips.

I came knowing Germany through its research literature, as a place that produces thorough and exacting methodological work. My Fulbright year added an understanding of where that exactness comes from by experiencing German research values firsthand, including the willingness to discuss a disagreement in good faith until it resolves, the assumption that any scientific claim should be defensible from multiple angles, the seriousness with which everyone treats rest and life outside work, and the aspiration not to let any finite resource go to waste.

However, alongside these new understandings, the kindness of the German people is what I’ll remember the most. I’d been told to expect reservedness, and what I found was a warmth that never publicizes itself but shows up consistently in neighbors (who walked me through unfamiliar paperwork), colleagues (who switched to English without being asked whenever I looked lost), and even strangers (including a random family who got me onto the next Deutsche Bahn train home, in first class no less, once for free!). Gemütlichkeit turns out to describe an everyday practice of how Germans make sure people (especially visitors) are cared for and comfortable, and if I ever leave Germany, I will sorely miss it.

What I’m Taking With Me

This was my first time living outside the United States, and what I gained alongside the research experience is a kind of courage I didn’t know was available to me. Ten months of building a life in a country whose language I was still learning, of paperwork and apartment hunting and the slow work of making friends, showed me how much I’m able to take on, and how much help I’d be given whenever I asked for it. I no longer treat working abroad as a departure from a plan, since it’s now become the plan (I’m staying in Germany through my defense in 2027).

My thanks to Dr. Sabine Hoffmann, who supervised this year with unfailing generosity, and to her group and the Institut für Statistik for taking me in; to Fulbright Germany and the German-American Fulbright Commission; to Amerikahaus München and to Reach the World; to my advisors Prof. Brian Caffo and Prof. Stephanie Hicks and chair Prof. Liz Stuart at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who made room for a year abroad in the middle of a dissertation; and to the 2025/2026 cohort, who made a large country feel like a small and reachable one. The papers and the software from this year will have their own life, but the most durable result is that I now attempt things I would have never dreamed of before my Fulbright.

This site (my personal website, AlyssaColumbus.com) is not an official site of the Fulbright Program or the U.S. Department of State. The views expressed on this site are entirely those of myself, Alyssa Columbus, and do not represent the views of the Fulbright Program, the U.S. Department of State, or any of its partner organizations.

DEF CON Meets MCSC 2026: On Agency, AI, and the Future We Are Learning to Navigate

Posted on February 13, 2026 by Alyssa Columbus in AI & Society, Conferences, Cybersecurity, Fulbright Germany, Reflections, Research

Some conferences feel like a collection of talks. Others feel like a set of ideas that continue unfolding long after you leave the venue.

DEF CON Meets Munich Cyber Security Conference (MCSC) 2026 was the latter.

I’m currently living in Munich on a Fulbright grant, and earlier today, I was fortunate to have the chance to attend this event. It was one of those situations where you walk in expecting to learn something interesting and leave realizing you need to think more carefully about a whole set of assumptions you didn’t even realize you were making.

I left not with a list of soundbites or takeaways, but with a question that stayed with me throughout the day: who has agency in the systems we are building, and how do we preserve it?

Jeff Moss (Founder of DEF CON) opened with a framing that was simple, yet precise. Agency, in his view, is about control over your digital identity. Your domain name system. Your email. Your infrastructure. Your keys. If you do not control those pieces, you are not fully in control of your digital presence. You are relying on someone else to maintain it for you. This idea carried through everything that followed.

Panel 1: Agentic AI, Offense, and the Reconfiguration of Expertise

The first panel brought together Ariel Herbert-Voss (Co-founder and CEO of RunSybil, formerly a research scientist at OpenAI), Daniel Cuthbert (Global Head of Cybersecurity at Santander Group), and Yan Shoshitaishvili (Associate Professor at Arizona State University), with Jeff Moss moderating. Jeff Moss is shown on the left in the image, followed by the panelists in the order listed above.

The opening question was direct: where does power actually sit right now in AI? With users, with developers, or with the organizations building these models?

Herbert-Voss spoke from experience inside model development. She emphasized that the scale required to build frontier models is not something most organizations can access. It’s not just about writing better algorithms, but also compute, data, and infrastructure at a level that only a few actors currently have. From her perspective, it’s unlikely that these capabilities will be widely open sourced in the near future.

Shoshitaishvili pushed this further by describing what he is seeing in practice. Frontier models are already capable of performing at a level comparable to expert hackers, while local models are still far behind. The difference is not marginal; it’s a different category of capability.

Cuthbert added another dimension. From his vantage point in vulnerability research, the pace of change over the past six months has been unlike anything he has seen in decades. Tasks that once required deep specialization can now be partially or fully automated. He described building agents that carry out meaningful portions of his own workflow.

There was an interesting back and forth here that I kept thinking about afterward, where Shoshitaishvili pointed out that switching between models can actually be quite straightforward at the application level. Because these systems operate through natural language, you can design infrastructure that allows you to move between providers relatively easily. However, Herbert-Voss and Cuthbert both made it clear that this flexibility does not extend to the underlying systems themselves. Building the models remains concentrated among a very small number of organizations.

So there is a distinction that matters. You can have flexibility in how you use models without having control over how those models are built. This distinction feels important beyond AI, as it shows up in many systems where the interface appears open, but the underlying structure is not.

The conversation then moved into offense and defense. Cuthbert described how tools like Raptor are beginning to change the dynamics by generating not only vulnerabilities and exploits, but also patches to address these problems. Shoshitaishvili connected this to earlier work in automated software repair and pointed out how far the field has come. Problems that once required careful human reasoning can now be handled by models that infer intent from context.

At the same time, both were careful to emphasize that this progress does not solve everything. Defending an entire organization is still a complex systems problem. It requires understanding interactions across infrastructure, not just individual vulnerabilities.

There was also a moment that felt particularly honest. Shoshitaishvili talked about teaching large classes in cybersecurity and how difficult it has become to motivate students when agents can outperform most of them on standard tasks. Cuthbert responded with a more optimistic perspective, suggesting that this shift allows people to focus on more creative and higher level problems. Both points can be true.

In my own work, I think a lot about how easy it is to produce analytical outputs without fully understanding the process behind them. When the space of possible approaches is large, and when tools make it easy to generate results, the challenge becomes knowing what those results actually mean.

This tension is not new; it’s just showing up in yet another form.

Panel 2: Network Effects, Civil Society, and Structural Constraints

The second panel featured (from left to right in the image above) Meredith Whittaker (President of Signal), Runa Sandvik (Founder of Granitt), and Jacob Braun (Executive Director of the Cyber Policy Initiative at the University of Chicago and former U.S. Office of the National Cyber Director official).

If the first panel asked who builds and controls AI systems, this one asked: why do we struggle to create viable alternatives to dominant platforms? In other words, while the first panel focused on capabilities, this one focused on constraints.

Whittaker made a point that reframed the discussion for me. The issue is not that we lack alternatives to dominant platforms. The issue is that communication systems are shaped by network effects. They become more valuable as more people use them, which makes it difficult for alternatives to gain traction. This is not new (it’s been true for communication systems for a long time), but it is easy to forget how much it shapes our current options. You can choose a more secure platform, but if the people you need to communicate with are not there, that choice has real costs.

Sandvik brought this into a very practical context. In her work with journalists and other at-risk groups, large platforms are often necessary. They provide infrastructure, uptime, and security that would be difficult to replicate independently. At the same time, those platforms come with trade-offs. Her approach was not to frame this as a binary choice, but as an understanding of when to use which tools. When to rely on large platforms. When to use something like Signal. When it makes sense to self host.

This idea of situational decision making stood out to me, because in my Fulbright project, I spend a lot of time thinking about how different analytical choices lead to different outcomes, and how important it is to make those choices visible. Here, the same idea applies at a systems level. The choices exist, but they are not always clearly articulated or easy to evaluate.

Braun added a policy perspective that helped explain why some of these issues persist. Large companies have access to policymakers through established channels. Civil society and independent researchers often do not. Bringing those perspectives into policy discussions requires intentional effort. He described efforts like the Hackers’ Almanack, which aim to document what systems can actually do so that policymakers are not relying on incomplete or biased information.

There was a shared recognition across the panel that civil society is doing extraordinary work (for example, by protecting journalists and safeguarding cultural archives), but it’s often doing so with precarious funding and limited structural support.

Whittaker was especially direct about the resource asymmetry. Running a secure, global communication system like Signal costs tens of millions annually, even without large policy or marketing teams. This is modest by big tech standards but enormous by nonprofit standards.

This tension was not framed as doom. Instead, it was framed as a design problem for us all to contemplate. How do we build ecosystems where incentives align with public interest? How do we resource open infrastructure sustainably?

Panel 3: Regulating Outcomes in a Rapidly Changing Landscape

The final panel brought Daniel Cuthbert back, alongside Jacob Braun, Perry Adams (Former official at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and now at Dartmouth’s Institute for Security, Technology, and Society), and Louise Marie Hurel (Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute). All are shown from left to right in the image above.

The theme was “regulate the outcome.” Why has policy struggled to address risks posed by AI and next-generation technologies?

Herbert-Voss earlier had noted that capabilities are evolving so quickly that regulating inputs (like training data, architectures, and internal design choices) may be impractical. In this panel, that idea was revisited: perhaps regulation should focus on consequences rather than construction.

The panel noted, however, that this shift raises difficult questions, since outcomes are often probabilistic and context-dependent. How do we measure these outcomes? What counts as harm? Who decides what is acceptable?

Adams and Hurel both emphasized that these are not straightforward questions. They require careful thought about values as well as technical understanding.

Cuthbert introduced another layer by noting that models are becoming more aware of how they are being evaluated. If systems can adapt their behavior when they are being tested, then traditional evaluation methods may not capture their full range of behavior.

Braun connected this to broader geopolitical concerns. If compute is the key resource underlying these systems, then access to compute becomes a strategic issue.

Again, agency appears at multiple levels. Individual, organizational, and national.

Walking Out: “Zukunft”

On my way out, I saw the word “Zukunft” (which means “future” in German) lit up on a wall. It felt like a fitting way to end the day.

What I appreciated about this event was not a singular conclusion or a dramatic narrative of inevitability. It was the seriousness with which uncertainty was treated. There was disagreement. There were tensions. But there was also a shared commitment to grappling with complexity honestly.

From the vantage point of my own work in thinking about multiplicity, uncertainty, and the invisible degrees of freedom in decision-making, I left with a sense that we are facing a parallel challenge at societal scale.

The systems we’re building are powerful. They can augment expertise, surface vulnerabilities, and strengthen defense. They can also centralize power, obscure processes, and constrain choice. Agency, then, is not something we either possess or forfeit once and for all. It is something we negotiate continuously through technical design, institutional structures, and collective norms.

The future is not pre-written, but it will be shaped by whether we insist on making the space of decisions (technical, political, and ethical) visible enough to engage with deliberately.

That, to me, is a hopeful challenge.