Dr. Heather S. Gregg is a non-resident senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Currently located in Germany, she lectures and teaches for NATO and other European-based security cooperation organizations. From 2023-2024, she was Professor of Irregular Warfare/Hybrid Threats at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch, Germany. Before that, Dr. Gregg was a professor at the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) and the Department of Military Strategy, Planning, and Operations (DMSPO). From 2006 to 2019, Dr. Gregg was an associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Department of Defense Analysis, where she worked primarily with Special Operations Forces. Before joining NPS, she was an associate political scientist at the RAND Corporation. In addition to her academic experience, she has spent time in several regions of conflict including Palestine/West Bank and the former Yugoslavia.
Dr. Gregg earned her Ph.D. in Political Science in 2003 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her dissertation work was on historic and contemporary causes of religiously motivated violence. Dr. Gregg also holds a Master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School, where she studied Islam, and a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Dr. Gregg has written extensively on religiously motivated violence, irregular warfare/hybrid threats, and repairing communities in the wake of war and political instability. She is the author of Religious Terrorism (Cambridge 2020); Building the Nation: Missed Opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan (University of Nebraska Press, 2018); and The Path to Salvation: Religious Violence from the Crusades to Jihad (Potomac, 2014). She also has published articles and book chapters on Al Qaeda, including “Fighting the Jihad of the Pen: Countering Al Qaeda’s Ideology” (Terrorism and Political Violence, 2010) and “Crafting a Better Grand Strategy to Fight the Global War on Terror: Lessons from the Early Years of the Cold War” (Foreign Policy Analysis, 2010), in addition to co-editing and contributing to The Three Circles of War: Understanding the Dynamics of Modern War in Iraq (Potomac, 2010).
Heather S. Gregg, Ph.D. 