David Malet teaches at the School of Public Affairs at American University. Previously he served as Director of the Security Policy Studies Program at the George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs. He also taught at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and at Colorado State University-Pueblo, where he was Director of the Center for the Study of Homeland Security and the University Honors Program. From 2000-2003 he served as Research Assistant on national security issues to US Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle.

Professor Malet has been researching foreign fighters since 2005 and is the author of Foreign Fighters: Transnational Identity in Civil Conflicts (Oxford University Press, 2013 1st edition, 2017 2nd edition) and co-editor of Transnational Actors in War and Peace: Militants, Activists, and Corporations in World Politics (Georgetown University Press, 2017). He regularly consults on foreign fighter policy challenges for organizations including the United Nations, US Department of State, the UAE Ministry of Youth, Culture and Education, and Australian law enforcement agencies. He is currently engaged in a Minerva Initiative-funded study on radicalization among religious converts.

His second manuscript, Biotechnology and International Security (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), examines the militarization of human enhancement and other new forms of asymmetric warfare. His interest in military applications of biotech stems from his experience working in the congressional office that was the target of the 2001 anthrax attacks, and during 2011-2014 led a EPA-NHSRC study of public risk communications following bioterrorism.

His work has been published in outlets including Foreign Affairs, Terrorism and Political Violence, The Journal of Homeland Security Management, Orbis, Defence Studies, The Monkey Cage, TIME, and Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, and he provides analysis to media including NPR, CNN, CBC, Bloomberg Europe, Bloomberg Asia, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and Xinhua.