LC

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS · BOSTON UNIVERSITY · CLASS OF 2027

Lev Cohen

I'm the co-founder and CEO of InSurge, a policy intelligence company that shows trade associations and small organizations how a state bill reaches the local permits and agendas they care about. I've worked policy at four levels: a city council dispute in Emeryville, public affairs accounts in Sacramento, federal legislation for government relations clients in Boston, and geopolitical risk at Wikistrat in Washington. I study international relations at Boston University and spent last year at Sciences Po.

CAL-ACCESS ◆FPPC NETFILE ◆FEC ◆CA LEGISLATIVE RECORDS ◆PLANNING COMMISSION AGENDAS ◆CITY COUNCIL AGENDAS ◆EUR-LEX ◆EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT VOTES ◆SUPABASE ◆PYTHON ◆TYPESCRIPT ◆REACT ◆CAL-ACCESS ◆FPPC NETFILE ◆FEC ◆CA LEGISLATIVE RECORDS ◆PLANNING COMMISSION AGENDAS ◆CITY COUNCIL AGENDAS ◆EUR-LEX ◆EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT VOTES ◆SUPABASE ◆PYTHON ◆TYPESCRIPT ◆REACT ◆

01 / Scale

Four levels
of government.

01 · 2025 · Emeryville & Oakland, CA

CITY

Forty45 Management

Government Relations and Strategy Intern

Engaged Emeryville City Council on a multimodal infrastructure dispute that affected light industrial businesses. Built the firm a property portal from scratch; the team manages 12 Bay Area investment properties in it today.

02 · 2026 · Sacramento, CA

STATE

Swing Strategies

Public Affairs Fellow

Traced PAC and independent expenditure money to 100+ California candidates using FEC, Cal-Access, and FPPC NetFile filings. Wrote Python tools that handled stakeholder mapping and FPPC compliance tracking for the firm's statewide accounts, which cut the hours the team spent on manual research.

View InSurge

03 · 2025–2026 · Washington, DC & Boston

FEDERAL

O'Neill & Associates · Wikistrat

Government Relations · Intelligence Research

At O'Neill & Associates, I tracked pending federal bills for client accounts and wrote regulatory briefings for client strategy sessions. At Wikistrat, I ran geopolitical wargames for a network of 2,000+ subject-matter experts and wrote their results up as risk assessments and forecasts.

04 · 2025–2026 · Paris, France

INTERNATIONAL

Sciences Po Paris

Exchange student

Spent my exchange year at Sciences Po. Built Apella there, an EU politics tracker that covers all 27 member states, and placed top 5 at the Sciences Po AI Hackathon with it.

View Apella

02 / Work

Built.

03 PRODUCTS · 2025–2026

CO-FOUNDER & CEO · 2025–PRESENT

InSurge

State bills and local agendas, linked and scored for small organizations.

FiscalNote and Quorum sell to enterprise policy teams. A county farm bureau or medical society has one staffer to watch the statehouse and every local board at once. InSurge watches both, links each state bill to the local rules it touches, and sends a morning brief or Slack alert with every item cited to its source record. I co-founded it with Allegra Hoddie, our CTO, and we're running customer discovery across California and Massachusetts.

2,000+ California bills scored
25+ councils, county boards, and commissions watched
7 of 7 first meetings became custom demos
TypeScriptReactPythonSupabaseLLM pipelineVercel
insurge / sb-963

STATE BILL

SB 963Signed · Takes effect Jan 1, 2027

Coastal development permits: appeal: de novo review

Changes coastal permit appeals to de novo review, making permits harder to defend.

LOCAL HOOKS · 3

Sep 17

Coastal Development Permit, tree removal, Eureka area

Humboldt County Planning Commission

Sep 17

Coastal Development Permit, Woodland Way, Eureka

Humboldt County Planning Commission

Sep 3

Conditional Use Permit, wireless facility, McKinleyville

Humboldt County Planning Commission

SOURCE LINKED

PRIVATE · IN PRODUCTION · 2026

MAROM

An operating system for a family office.

A family office runs its commercial properties, operating businesses, investment accounts, and household finances out of MAROM every day. Advisors, property managers, contractors, and tenants each get their own portal, and row-level security in the database keeps each of them to their own data. The mockup uses sample numbers.

5 role-based portals
4 asset classes in one ledger
TanStack StartReactTypeScriptTailwindSupabaseVercel

Private system. Ask me for a walkthrough.

marom.app / overview

CONSOLIDATED VIEW

$12,480,000

+4.8% YTD

LEASE EXPIRIES

04

ALLOCATION

HACKATHON · TOP 5 · SCIENCES PO AI HACKATHON · MARCH 2026

Apella

EU elections and votes in one place.

Apella tracks elections, candidates, parties, MEPs, and parliamentary votes across all 27 EU member states. I built it for the Sciences Po AI Hackathon in March 2026, where it placed top 5.

27 member states
Top 5 finish
ReactViteTypeScriptTailwindshadcn/uiSupabase
Open Apella ↗
apella.app / overview

EUROPEAN UNION

Election monitor

27 STATES
PARLIAMENT PROJECTION720 SEATS

03 / Curriculum vitae

Record.

Aug 2025 – Present

Co-founder and CEO

InSurge Intelligence LLC · Boston, MA

  • ↳Co-founded a policy intelligence company for small organizations: trade associations, chambers of commerce, farm bureaus, medical societies, and local newsrooms.
  • ↳Shipped a product that links state bills to the local agendas they touch, scores 2,000+ California bills, and watches 25+ councils, county boards, and commissions, with every item cited to its source record.
  • ↳Ran customer discovery across California and Massachusetts: 500+ organizations contacted, 30+ stakeholder conversations, and custom demos out of 7 of 7 first meetings.
  • ↳Wrote the go-to-market plan: land one county chapter, then sell the state body above it, starting with California's 54 county farm bureaus.

May – Sep 2026

Public Affairs Fellow

Swing Strategies · Sacramento, CA

  • ↳Traced PAC and independent expenditure contributions across 100+ California candidates through FEC, Cal-Access, and FPPC NetFile.
  • ↳Designed and built AI research tools in Python that automated stakeholder mapping, FPPC compliance tracking, and legislative summaries for the firm's statewide public affairs accounts.
  • ↳Cut the manual research time on each account and fed the findings into client strategy and compliance work.
  • ↳Tracked California bills and ballot initiatives for client accounts.

May – Aug 2026

Intelligence Research Intern

Wikistrat · Washington, DC

  • ↳Managed geopolitical wargaming simulations for a network of 2,000+ subject-matter experts, coordinating scenario inputs across exercises that ran at the same time.
  • ↳Covered scenarios on regional conflict, political risk, and global stability.
  • ↳Wrote risk assessments and strategic forecasts from the simulation output, flagging emerging threats from conflict, political instability, and economic disruption.

Sep – Dec 2025

Government Relations Intern

O'Neill & Associates · Boston, MA

  • ↳Tracked and analyzed pending federal legislation across several client accounts.
  • ↳Researched stakeholder positions and coalition dynamics around each bill.
  • ↳Prepared regulatory briefings for the team ahead of client strategy sessions.

May – Sep 2025

Government Relations and Strategy Intern

Forty45 Management · San Francisco / Oakland, CA

  • ↳Engaged Emeryville City Council on a multimodal infrastructure dispute affecting local light industrial businesses.
  • ↳Researched legislation and regulation for the firm and built stakeholder coalitions around its local policy issues.
  • ↳Found a gap in the firm's property management operations and built a web portal from scratch to close it. The firm uses it to manage 12 investment properties across the Bay Area.

Education

Boston University, Pardee School of Global Studies. BA International Relations, Foreign Policy and Security Studies. May 2027.

Sciences Po Paris, exchange, 2025–2026.

Congress and National SecurityStrategic IntelligenceIntelligence and Homeland SecurityInternational Economics

Languages

Englishnative
Spanishnearly fluent
Hebrewnearly fluent
Arabicbeginning

Tools

Technical

Python · SQL · TypeScript · React · Next.js · Git · Vercel

Research

LexisNexis · Quorum · Politico Pro · VoteSmart · GovTrack · Salesforce · Qualtrics · OSINT

Beyond work

Board member, Border Youth Tennis Exchange, since 2022.

Writer and editor, Boston Political Review, since 2023.

BU Division I Tennis. ITF career-high top 300 USA.

Download full CV (PDF)

04 / Contact

lev@insurgeintl.com

BOSTON, MA · NEW YORK FROM 2027