Jessica Stern
Research Professor
Jessica Stern is a research professor at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies and a 2024 Harry Frank Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar. Stern has taught courses on counter-terrorism for 25 years – at Boston University, Harvard, and CIA University. She is currently offering courses at the Pardee School on the psychology and history of terrorism. She has participated in several DOJ, DHS, NATO, and DOD-funded countering-violent extremism projects at Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health,and CNA. Stern is the coauthor with J.M. Berger of ISIS: The State of Terror; and the author of My War Criminal: Personal Encounters with an Architect of Genocide; Denial: A Memoir of Terror; Terror in the Name of God; and The Ultimate Terrorists. Stern served on President Clinton’s National Security Council Staff in 1994-95. She was included among seven “thinkers” in Time Magazine’s 2001 series profiling 100 innovators. She was selected as a John Simon Guggenheim fellow in 2009, a World Economic Forum fellow from 2002-2004, an International Affairs fellow in 1994, and elected to Sigma Xi, an engineering honors society, in 1986. Stern advises a number of government agencies on issues related to terrorism. She has a bachelor’s degree from Barnard College in chemistry, a master’s degree from MIT in technology policy, and a doctorate from Harvard University in public policy. She is a 2016 graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis.
Professor Stern’s areas of expertise include terrorism, trauma, rape, atrocities, and post-traumatic growth.
