Laura Dugan, Senate Past Chair
Laura Dugan joined the University of Maryland in 2001 as an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice. She is currently a professor in that department and serves as its associate chair. Over the years Dr. Dugan has served the department, the University, and the profession in many different roles. These include terms as Director of Graduate Studies and a member of the Graduate Council, and as a board member of the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA). Dr. Dugan is currently the Vice President Elect of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), and previously served that organization as an Executive Counselor, Chair of the National Policy Committee, and representative to the Crime and Justice Research Alliance. She has also served as the Chair of the Committee on Law and Justice Statistics for the American Statistical Association.
Dr. Dugan’s research examines the predictors and consequences of extremist and hateful violence, the efficacy of violence prevention/intervention policy and practice, and the intended and unintended consequences of government actions. 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), which chronicles more than 180,000 incidents of terrorism worldwide since 1970. She is co-principal investigator of the Government Actions in Terrorist Environments (GATE) dataset, which documents a full range of government actions that are relevant to terrorist organizations and their constituencies. When combined, these datasets can help identify strategies to reduce terrorist violence across different contexts. They also reveal ways that governments may have made violence worse.
Dr. Dugan holds a doctorate in Public Policy and Management and a Masters in Statistics from Carnegie Mellon University. She 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.