Dr. Lauren Van Metre is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. She is also senior advisor for peace, security, and democratic resilience at the National Democratic Institute, having worked on major conflict resolution and prevention initiatives at the Pentagon, the State Department, and the US Institute of Peace. Dr. Van Metre is a leading expert on community resilience to violence; she has conducted research and led field initiatives on building the strength and capacity of communities to resist violent actors and recover from the shock of violence.

Dr. Van Metre writes frequently for the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert blogon the war in the Donbas and its impact on Ukrainian politics and society. She has published frequently on issues of peace, fragility, and violence, including, most recently, Youth and Radicalization in Mombasa, Kenya: A Lexicon of Violent Extremist Language on Social Media (US Institute for Peace, 2018), Building Gender Equality in Ukraine (US Institute for Peace, 2017), Ukraine’s Internally Displaced Persons Hold a Key to Peace(Atlantic Council, 2017), and Peacebuilding and Resilience: How Society Responds to Violence (US Institute for Peace, 2016).

Dr. Van Metre joined NDI in 2018 to lead the Institute’s new Peace, Security, and Democratic Resilience initiative, strengthening NDI’s governance work in fragile and conflict-affected states. She is also an associate fellow at the University of Louvain la Neuve in Belgium and an adjunct professor at The Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University where she teaches strategy and leadership courses in the Master’s in International Policy and Practice program. Dr. Van Metre holds a PhD from Johns Hopkins University’s School for Advanced International Studies and an MA in Russian and East European Studies from Georgetown University.