When he was a child, Jeffrey Ding (BBA16)’s father taught him the ancient strategy game Go. With a vast number of moves available, a Go player must learn by trial and error to gain tactical foresight. Not so different from Ding’s University of Iowa education as a triple-major in economics, Chinese, and political science. 

“The business school is remarkably good about letting you mold your own path,” says Ding, who is a lifelong Hawkeye fan with alumni parents. “I came out of Tippie having all these different pathways. It gives you the margin to experiment and fail and try different things.” 

Ding was drawn to the Tippie College of Business because of global offerings like the International Business Certificate, Global Internship program, and study abroad. He is particularly grateful to Shari Piekarski, who founded the Global Internship Program and recently retired. Through these experiences, he interned for a member of the Hong Kong legislature’s pro-democracy coalition during the 2014 protests and studied at the University of Peking his senior year. 

After graduation, Ding worked for a summer at the U.S. Embassy in Dakar, Senegal, with the U.S. Foreign Service internship program. That fall, he began a master’s program in international relations at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. 

Around the same time, a computer program called AlphaGo made headlines for defeating a Go master, and Oxford founded its Centre for Governance in AI. Reading about a computer’s victory in the game he’d grown up playing while learning about AI policy sparked Ding’s interest in emerging technologies. He went on to earn a Ph.D. from Oxford and embark on a career in academia where he blends his interests in international relations, economics, and technology. 

Now an assistant professor of political science at George Washington University, Ding recently published a book, Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition. In it, he presents a novel theory of how technological revolutions affect the rise and fall of powerful countries. He specifically analyzes the U.S.-China balance of power in emerging technologies through the lens of what past industrial revolutions tell us about the future. 

This article appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of Tippie Magazine.