Research Fellow at the Future Security Initiative, Arizona State University

Dr. Heather S. Gregg is a research fellow at the Future Security Initiative at Arizona State University.

Dr. Gregg’s academic focus is on irregular warfare, hybrid threats, terrorism and counterterrorism, causes of extremism, and leveraging culture in population centric conflicts, including resiliency and repairing communities and national unity in the wake of war and political instability.

Dr. Gregg has held several academic positions in the U.S. Department of Defense. She was professor of Irregular Warfare/Hybrid Threats at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies (2023-2024), professor of military strategy at the U.S. Army War College (2019-2022), and associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where she worked primarily with Special Operations Forces (2006-2019). She is the 2017 recipient of the NPS school-wide Hamming Award for excellence in teaching. Dr. Gregg was also an associate political scientist at the RAND Corporation (2003-2006). She has conducted research for the DoD, USASOC, USSOCOM, OSD, TRADOC, NCTC, JIEDDO, U.S. Department of State, and the Irregular Warfare Center.

Dr. Gregg earned her PhD in Political Science in 2004 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also holds a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School, where she studied Islam, and a bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology, with honors, from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

In addition to academic experience, Dr. Gregg has worked with allies and partners on a range of security issues. She has lectured for NATO courses, and for conferences and workshops on countering hybrid threats, building societal resilience, and countering violent extremism. From 2013-2015, she was part of teaching and engagement teams in Tajikistan. In 2016, she taught at the Indonesian Defense University on subjects relating to asymmetric warfare. Most recently, she has participated in a series of engagements with NATO’s Center of Excellence, Defense Against Terrorism in Ankara, Türkiye and the Irregular Warfare Center in the United States.

Dr. Gregg has published extensively on irregular warfare/hybrid threats, religiously motivated conflict and extremism, including: “Hybrid Threats and Strategic Competition” (Connections 2024); Religious Terrorism (Cambridge University Press, 2020); “Religiously Motivated Violence” (Oxford University Press 2016); Building the Nation: Missed Opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan (University of Nebraska 2018); The Path to Salvation: Religious Violence from the Crusades to Jihad (University of Nebraska 2014); and co-editor of The Three Circles of War: Understanding the Dynamics of Modern War in Iraq (Potomac, 2010).