START welcomes a new member to the research team. Alex Wilner joins START for the summer months from ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Switzerland.
Wilner is working with Gary Ackerman's Special Projects Division to help develop and refine the Influencing Violent Extremist Organizations (I-VEO) research platform. "So far, we've got one project proposal under development that explores the role targeted killings and drone strikes have on militant (group and individual) behavior," Wilner says. Wilner is a co-primary investigator for the I-VEO project.
Wilner has been working with START's databases and reports in his own research for years. While working at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, he had the opportunity to work with START researchers Martha Crenshaw and Gary Ackerman.
"START continues to attract bright, hungry minds to investigate the under-explored side of terrorism studies and I'm excited to be a part of that," Wilner says. Other than his role on the Special Projects teams, Wilner is also working on a book on deterring terrorism.
Dr. Alex Wilner is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Security Studies at the ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), in Switzerland. He is also a Sessional Lecturer at the University of Zurich, where he teaches Issues in Contemporary Terrorism and Radicalization. A Canadian citizen, he completed his Ph.D. in 2008/9 at Dalhousie University, under the supervision of Dr. Frank Harvey. His research on deterring terrorism has been awarded a number of prestigious scholarships from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Canadian Department of National Defence (Security and Defence Forum), and the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.