Anniki Mikelsaar is a Dame Stephanie Shirley Scholar and DPhil candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. Her research, supervised by Carl-Benedikt Frey and Vili Lehdonvirta, examines the governance and security of digital infrastructure with a focus on submarine cable networks.
Anniki’s work on network infrastructure security bridges academic, policy, and professional contexts. She previously held the Sir Richard Dearlove Scholarship at the Cambridge Security Initiative, conducting research at St John’s College, University of Cambridge. She has also worked as a Futures Analyst at the UK Ministry of Defence. Her work has been presented to governmental and military audiences including the Royal Air Force (RAF) Benson, the NATO Force Integration Unit, the Government Office of Estonia, and the Baltic Defence College.
She was named a 2024 Fellow of the Oxford China Policy Lab and selected for the 2025 SubOptic Foundation Student-Young Professionals Track. Anniki holds a Master’s in History from the University of Oxford, where she was awarded a Merit and the Best Thesis Prize (2023–2024), and a First-class undergraduate degree from Sciences Po Paris and the London School of Economics (2022). She convenes cross-sector dialogues connecting the submarine cable industry with government and academic stakeholders