Ellen Chapin, Ph.D. Candidate

ejc5ys@gmail.com

Stanford University

Country: United States (District of Columbia)

About Me:

Ellen Chapin is an expert in counterterrorism and grand strategy. She graduated with highest honors from the University of Virginia in 2014 as a Jefferson Scholar, and with a B.A. in Foreign Affairs and Political Philosophy, Policy, and Law. After graduation, Ellen spent two years at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, where she studied national security law, coordinated national white collar crime takedowns, and assisted with trials against perpetrators of fraud. She then moved to Yale’s Jackson Institute on Global Affairs, where she focused on the intersection of counterterrorism and statistical analysis. In the summer of 2017, she served as a Rosenthal Fellow at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, researching and publishing on Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, and other terrorism beyond the Islamic State’s caliphate.Ellen works on using open-source data to understand how global jihadist networks communicate and direct their affiliates to partake in different levels of political violence. She has been published in several academic journals on violent extremism, including Security Studies and Terrorism and Political Violence. After graduation, Ellen will spend a year as General Stanley McChrystal’s chief speechwriter in Washington D.C., and subsequently begin pursuing her PhD in Political Science at Stanford University.

Research Interests

Terrorism

Political Violence

Foreign Policy