Laura Dugan is Ralph D. Mershon Professor of Human Security and Professor of Sociology at The Ohio State University. Her research is motivated by the broader question of how leaders can reduce or enhance the risk of violence and other types of insecurities due to extremist ideologies and hateful intent. This work requires open-source data collection to capture more subtle day-to-day activities by leaders across the globe. As such, Dr. Dugan is co-co-principal investigator of the Government Actions in Terrorist Environments (GATE) datasets. The GATE data record government actions related to terrorists and their constituencies for a select set of countries since 1987. She is also a founding co-principal investigator for the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), the most comprehensive terrorism database available, as it records all known attacks across the globe since 1970 Furthermore, she also designs methodological strategies to overcome data limitations inherent in the social sciences.

Dr. Dugan has coauthored Putting Terrorism into Context: Lessons Learned from the World’s Most Comprehensive Terrorism Database, along with more than sixty journal articles and book chapters. Her publications appear in journals such as the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Criminology, the American Sociological Review, Law and Society Review, as well as Terrorism and Political Violence, and the Journal of Peace Research. She serves on the Editorial Boards of Criminology and The Causes, Conduct, and Consequences of Terrorism book series by Oxford University Press and National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START).