Heather S. Gregg

Senior Fellow - National Security Program

Dr. Heather S. Gregg is a 2023 Templeton Fellow in the National Security Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and professor of irregular warfare at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch, Germany.

She has spent much of her career focusing on religiously motivated violence, causes of extremism, irregular warfare, and leveraging culture in population centric conflicts, including repairing communities and national unity in the wake of war and political instability.  She has held several positions in and out of government service, including at the U.S. Army War College, the Naval Postgraduate School, and the RAND Corporation. 

Dr. Gregg earned her PhD in Political Science in 2003 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.  

Dr. Gregg has published extensively on religiously motivated conflict, extremism, and population centric warfare, including: 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).