Dr Sarah Kirchberger is Academic Director at the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University (ISPK), Vice President of the German Maritime Institute (DMI) and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. She was previously an Assistant Professor of Sinology at Hamburg University and a naval analyst with shipbuilder TKMS. She is the author of Assessing China’s Naval Power: Technological Innovation, Economic Constraints, and Strategic Implications (2015), co-author of The China Plan: A Transatlantic Blueprint for Strategic Competition (2021) and co-editor of Russia-China Relations: Emerging Alliance or Eternal Rivals? (2022). Her research focuses on China’s undersea warfare; PLAN modernization; Chinese defense-industrial development; and military-technological co-operation between China, Russia and Ukraine. Kirchberger occasionally lectures at the German Armed Forces Command and Staff College and the NATO Defense College and has been invited to present at the US National Defense University, US Naval War College, US Army War College, ROC National Defense University, and at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, UC Berkeley and Yale, among others. In 2023 she testified before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) on China’s undersea warfare. Kirchberger holds a MA and a PhD in Sinology from Hamburg University after studies in Hamburg, Taipei and Trier.