Eliza Gheorghe is a visiting scholar in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University and an assistant professor in the International Relations Department at Bilkent University. She earned her doctorate in International Relations from the University of Oxford (No Corrections, 2014) and an M.A. in Security Studies from Georgetown University (Honors, 2010), on a Fulbright scholarship.

She held research fellowships at the Institute for Peace Science and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, Yale University, Harvard Kennedy School, Cornell University, SAIS-Johns Hopkins University, the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies, and Université Paris 1 Panthéon – Sorbonne. Her research was also funded by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Fundação Getúlio Vargas, and the University of Vienna.

She is the recipient of the International Fellowship for Outstanding Researchers (2019-2022) from the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBITAK), with her project The Globalization of the Atom: Nuclear Trade and the Spread of Atomic Weapons. In 2020, she was awarded the Outstanding Young Scientist Prize from the Turkish Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on nuclear proliferation and the evolution of the nuclear market; questions of grand strategy and nuclear alliances; nuclear dominoes; and illicit trade and trafficking networks. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in International Security, the Chinese Journal of International Politics, International History Review, European Review of History, Cold War History, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, and Cambridge University Press.

At Bilkent, she teaches International Relations, International Security, and Nuclear Proliferation and International Politics.