Samantha Custer

Samantha Custer is a PhD student at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, the recipient of the AY2025-2026 Kelleher Fellowship in Cooperative Security, and a graduate assistant supporting the Center for International and Security Studies. Her research examines the influence of development investments, public diplomacy and security cooperation in the Global South with a focus on China, Russia and the US. 

Custer leverages novel data and methods to understand the impact of external money and ideas on domestic policy reforms in low- and middle-income countries. She enjoys mixed methods projects that leverage human subjects research (surveys, interviews and experiments), along with quantitative analysis of structured and unstructured data.

Custer brings to her SPP doctoral studies an extensive track record in applied research that is academically rigorous and policy relevant. She founded and led a policy analysis team at William & Mary’s AidData lab, designing and implementing over 60 studies worth US$20 million in collaboration with diverse government agencies, think tanks, and private philanthropies in the U.S. and abroad. Custer helped pioneer many of the lab’s efforts to create replicable and scalable indicators to monitor fuzzy concepts related to non-traditional forms of development finance, foreign policy influence and eroding civic space. While at AidData, she taught courses on the influence playbooks of great powers for the Whole of Government Center of Excellence at William & Mary and collaborated with former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on research to support his Gates Policy Forum series, which convenes high-level Congressional, executive branch and private sector leaders to deliberate policy options to strengthen U.S. foreign policy tools.

Over the last decade, Custer has advised leading international organizations such as the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations Development Program in the design and use of client surveys to inform their strategic planning, results monitoring, and evaluations. Her work has been published in industry-recognized policy and academic outlets such as the American Journal of Political Science, the Handbook of Public Administration Reform, the Journal of International Cooperation in Education, the National Bureau of Asian Research’s Strategic Asia, and the OECD’s Development Cooperation Report.

Previously, Custer researched open data movements and citizen feedback initiatives with the World Bank, co-taught a class on U.S. national security with former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, directed multilingual education programs in Southeast Asia with SIL International, and conducted performance monitoring for Save the Children US to ensure sponsored children were benefiting from its community development programs. She holds a Master of Science in Foreign Service and a Master of Public Policy from Georgetown University, as well as a graduate certificate in survey research from the University of Connecticut School of Public Policy.