Lauren Van Metre

Lauren Van Metre is a peace and security expert, having worked on major conflict resolution and prevention initiatives at the Pentagon, the State Department, the US Institute of Peace and the Atlantic Council. She 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. Dr. Van Metre is a leading expert on community resilience to violence, having 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. She has published frequently on issues of peace, fragility and violence, including, most recently, Peacebuilding and Resilience: How Society Responds to Violence, Community Resilience to Violent Extremism in Kenya and Building Gender Equality in Ukraine for the US Institute of Peace, Youth and Radicalization in Mombasa, Kenya: A Lexicon of Violent Extremist Language on Social Media for USIP's PeaceTech Lab, and, Ukraine's Internally Displaced Persons Hold a Key to Peace -- an Issue Brief for the Atlantic Council.

Dr. Van Metre is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council where she writes frequently for Ukraine Alert on the Donbas War and its impacts on Ukrainian politics and society, and, an Associate Fellow at the University of Louvain la Neuve in Belgium. She is also an adjunct professor at The Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University where she teaches on strategy and leadership in the Master's in International Policy and Practice program.

Dr. Van Metre holds a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University's School for Advanced International Studies and an M.A. in Russian and East European Studies from Georgetown University.