Laura Dugan is Ralph D. Mershon Professor of Human Security and Professor of Sociology at The Ohio State University. Her research examines the consequences of violence and the efficacy of violence prevention/intervention policy and practice. She also designs methodological strategies to overcome data limitations inherent in the social sciences. Dr. Dugan is a founding co-principal investigator for the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and co-principal investigator to the Government Actions in Terrorist Environments (GATE) dataset. The GTD is the most comprehensive source of terrorist incidents, as it records all known attacks across the globe since 1970. The GATE data record government actions related to terrorists and their constituencies for a select set of countries since 1987. Dr. Dugan’s research has been published in top journals in criminology and sociology. She has also published in political science and public policy journals.

She has published with colleagues, 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.