Jessie Moritz was appointed to CAIS following a postdoctoral research fellowship with the Transregional Institute, Princeton University, where she focused on post-2014 economic reform programs in the GCC. She received her PhD from ANU in 2017; her dissertation, 'Slick Operators: Revising Rentier State Theory for the Modern Arab States of the Gulf', received the 2017 Association for Gulf and Peninsula Studies Dissertation Award. She also holds a BA with first class honours in International Relations from the ANU. Her current research focuses on the political economy of oil in the Arabian Peninsula, with a particular focus on state-society relations and diversification strategies. Her most recent publications include "Reformers and the Rentier State: Re-Evaluating the Co-Optation Mechanism in Rentier State Theory," Journal of Arabian Studies 8:S1 (2018) 46-64, and "Oil and Societal Quiescence: Rethinking Causal Mechanisms in Rentier State Theory," Project on Middle East Political Science 33 (January 2019) 40-43.