Bill Kakenmaster is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Regulation and Global Governance at the Australian National University. His research examines the political economy of climate change and the environment, focusing in particular on climate mitigation in authoritarian regimes, and has been published in Climate Policy, Global Environmental Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, and Nature Climate Change.

Bill received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame in 2025, where he was a PhD Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.