Louise I. Shelley

Dr. Louise Shelley is a University Professor at George Mason University. She is in the School of Public Policy and is the founder and director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC). She is a leading expert on human trafficking, transnational crime, corruption and terrorism. Professor Shelley is the co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Organized Crime and has served on the Global Agenda Council on Illicit Trade. She has spoken at various international fora and at numerous universities both in the United States and abroad on transnational crime and corruption. Additionally, she appears on television and radio, including appearances on CNN, NPR’s Marketplace, PBS, A&E, the History Channel and 60 Minutes. She has testified before the House Committee on International Relations, the Helsinki Commission, the House Banking Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on transnational crime, human trafficking and the links between financial crime, transnational crime, and terrorism. She is the author of Human Trafficking: A Global Perspective (Cambridge 2010) and is currently under contract for a new book on crime, corruption, and terrorism. She is the co-editor, with Professor Shiro Okubo, of Human Security, Transnational Crime and Human Trafficking: Asian and Western Perspectives (Routledge 2011) and, with Sally Stoecker, Human Traffic and Transnational Crime: Eurasian and American Perspectives (Rowman & Littlefield 2005). She has previously written Policing Soviet Society (Routledge, 1996), Lawyers in Soviet Worklife and Crime and Modernization, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on all aspects of transnational crime and corruption. She serves on the boards of Demokratizatsiya: the Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, and the European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, Global Crime and The International Annals of Criminology. She was elected to the Board of Directors of the International Society of Criminology for the years 1999-2004. Her expertise in transnational crime and corruption includes money laundering and illicit financial flows, human smuggling and trafficking, and national security issues. Since 1995, Dr. Shelley has run programs in Russia, Ukraine and Georgia with leading specialists on the problems of organized crime and corruption. She has also been the principal investigator of large-scale projects on money laundering from Russia, Ukraine and Georgia and in the training of law enforcement agencies in the issue of trafficking in persons. Dr. Shelley received her undergraduate degree cum laude from Cornell University in Penology and Russian literature. She holds an M.A. in Criminology from the University of Pennsylvania. She studied at the Law Faculty of Moscow State University on IREX and Fulbright Fellowships and holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. She held a Fulbright and researched and taught on crime issues in Oaxaca and Mexico City. She has also taught on transnational crime in Trento, Italy. She is the recipient of the Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, IREX, Kennan Institute, and Fulbright Fellowships and received a MacArthur Grant to establish the Russian Organized Crime Study Centers. In 1992, she received the Scholar-Teacher prize at American University, the top academic award of the university.