Stern Part of Team Awarded NATO Grant
Jessica Stern, Research Professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, is part of a team that received a grant from the NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme as part of the launch of two new research projects jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T).
The projects will help counter terrorist threats faced by NATO allies and partner countries. The Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency will lead the evaluation support for countering violent extremism (CVE) project. This is possible due to financial backing from NATO SPS and DHS S&T.
The project aims to create long-term capacity in the evaluation of initiatives to counter violent extremism. It will also improve the effectiveness, transparency and accountability of such programmes. The project team will work with experts from NATO member and partner countries to design and implement programme evaluations which meet local requirements. The project will improve evaluation and provide practical tools and methods for practitioners.
NATO’s Science for Peace and Security Programme is also helping address the potential threats posed by drones. NATO SPS and the U.S. Department for Homeland Security are jointly funding a project to develop technology to counter unmanned aerial systems (CUAS) and to deal with the risk posed to national security by low, slow and small (LSS) threats. The work will be led by Sandia National Laboratories, in collaboration with the University of New Mexico and the Swiss Federal Department of Defence, Civil Protection and Sport (armasuisse).
Stern is the coauthor with J.M. Berger of ISIS: The State of Terror; and the author of Denial: A Memoir of Terror, selected by the Washington Post as a best book of the year; Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill, selected by the New York Times as a notable book of the year; The Ultimate Terrorists; and numerous articles on terrorism.
She has held fellowships awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Erik Erikson Institute, and the MacArthur Foundation. She was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow, a National Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and a Fellow of the World Economic Forum. Stern taught as a Lecturer at Harvard University from 1999-2015. Prior to joining the Harvard faculty, she worked in government, serving on President Clinton’s National Security Council Staff and as an analyst at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Stern has nearly completed her training as an Advanced Academic Candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis. Learn more about her here.