Bio
Dr. Rebecca J. Wolfe is a leading expert on political violence, conflict and violent extremism. Currently, she is the Director of Evidence and Influence for Mercy Corps and an affiliate at NYU’s Steinhardt School. Dr. Wolfe draws on her practitioner and academic backgrounds to effectively research important development issues, design interventions that are theoretically grounded and evidence based, and communicate to multiple audiences.
Over her career, she has developed conflict prevention and violence reduction programs globally, including Kenya’s largest youth development program, gang violence prevention in Guatemala City, countering violent extremism programs in Nigeria and Yemen, and community-based conflict management interventions in Iraq, Syria, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Tajikistan. She has also published research on why young people engage in violence and how development interventions can be designed to reduce this support. She was recently a Fellow at Yale University’s Political Violence Field Lab. Dr. Wolfe has taught at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs and at the Wagner School for Public Service at New York University. She received her PhD in Social Psychology from Harvard University.