About
Laura Dugan is the Ralph D. Mershon Professor of Human Security and Professor of Sociology at The Ohio State University. She co-leads the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and Government Actions in Terrorist Environments (GATE) project, which are foundational datasets for understanding terrorism and government responses. Her work focuses on violence prevention policies, methodological innovation for overcoming data limitations, and the intersection of terrorism with political and social contexts.
Education includes a Ph.D. and M.S. in Public Policy and Management from Carnegie Mellon University (1995–1999), an M.S. in Statistics (1998), and a B.F.A. in Applied Media Arts from Edinboro University (1987).
Research interests span terrorism studies, criminological explanations for violence, government counterterrorism strategies, and methodological approaches to analyzing large-scale datasets. Her work bridges criminology, political science, and sociology, with a focus on empirically grounded analyses of terrorism’s causes and consequences.
Publications emphasize terrorism’s global patterns, the efficacy of interventions, and interdisciplinary methodological advancements. Key works include analyses of the GTD’s insights into terrorism’s evolution and GATE’s revelations about government actions’ impact on terrorism.
Her grants and advising involve leading large-scale projects like GTD and GATE, which are pivotal for academic and policy communities. She collaborates extensively on datasets and policy-oriented research, influencing both scholarly discourse and practical counterterrorism measures.
Laura Dugan’s research teams and labs focus on maintaining and expanding these databases while exploring their applications in policy contexts, ensuring data accessibility for global researchers and practitioners.
