Rikio Inouye is a Ph.D. candidate on the 2025-2026 job market specializing in race, religion, and international relations. His research employs survey experiments to examine how racial and religious identities shape public support for other people and countries, with broader implications for democratic solidarity, foreign policy attitudes, and international cooperation. His work is at the frontier of understanding how identity-based biases influence global politics.

He has two articles currently under revise and resubmit at International Studies Quarterly. His first article, awarded the Best Paper in Foreign Policy by APSA, analyzes the strategic patterns of U.S. and Chinese vaccine diplomacy during the COVID-19 pandemic. His second, a conjoint experiment, unpacks how American sympathies toward Israelis and Palestinians shifted in the wake of the October 7th attack. Additional projects examine how race and religion condition democratic solidarity in times of crisis and how Americans perceive migrant allies, such as those from Afghanistan and Iraq.

He is deeply committed to active and engaged learning. He was honored with Princeton’s George Kateb Teaching Award and the McGraw Center Exemplar Mentor Award in 2024. He has also organized pedagogy workshops for fellow graduate students and has been twice nominated for university-wide teaching awards.

Rikio graduated summa cum laude with highest honors from UC Berkeley in political science and is a proud alumnus of the Japan Exchange Teaching (JET) Program.