Aina Turillazzi is a PhD candidate in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC) at the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, The Australian National University. She studies how escalation changes when militaries delegate part of a decision to a machine. As armed forces field more AI-enabled autonomous systems, the familiar assumption that a human judgment sits behind every military act begins to break down. Turillazzi studies how that uncertainty changes the way states read one another, and whether it makes escalation harder to control. She studies these questions through wargames, which she will run in Australia and the United States.

Besides research, Turillazzi teaches across the undergraduate and graduate programes at ANU. She is course coordinator and tutor for STST8004 Deterrence and Defence in Australian Strategic Policy, and tutors STST3002 Living with Giants: Australia's Security in a Contested Asia. She has previously taught STST1001 Introduction to Security Studies, NSPO8012 Leadership, Risk, Resilience, and Crisis, and NSPO8006 National Security Policymaking. 

Turillazzi works on two Australian Department of Defence-funded research projects: currently, on the Pathways of Deterrence project, and previously, she was involved in Anticipating the Future of War: AI, Automated Systems, and Resort-to-Force Decision Making.

Turillazzi's route to strategic studies ran through economics and the politics of technology. Her early work sat at the meeting point of technology and regulation, from algorithmic pricing to the governance of the European Union's digital economy, and she held research positions across several European institutions – among them the Centre for Digital Ethics at the University of Bologna and the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Warsaw, where she convened policy dialogues on transatlantic affairs, focusing on the Russo-Ukrainian War. One question ran through all of it: how new technologies unsettle the arrangements that markets and states rely on. That question carried her from the digital economy to the study of war. 

Turillazzi has published journal articles on military technology and digital governance, and writes commentary for The Diplomat and The Strategist. She has also authored policy reports for the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network (APLN).