Dr. Louise Shelley is the Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Endowed Chair and a University Professor at George Mason University. She is in the Schar School of Policy and Government and directs the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC) that she founded.

She is a leading expert on the relationship among terrorism, organized crime and corruption as well as human trafficking, transnational crime and terrorism with a particular focus on the former Soviet Union. She also specializes in illicit financial flows and money laundering. She has recently completed an inaugural Andrew Carnegie Fellowship during which she wrote her book Dark Commerce: How a New Illicit Economy is Threatening our Future (Princeton University Press, November 2018) on illicit trade and sustainability. She held a Fulbright and researched and taught on crime issues in Mexico.

She has also taught on transnational crime in Italy. She is the recipient of the Guggenheim, NEH, IREX, Kennan Institute, and Fulbright and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships and received MacArthur Grants to establish the Russian Organized Crime Study Centers and to study the role of non-state actors in nuclear proliferation. Dirty Entanglements: Corruption, Crime and Terrorism was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. She is the author of Human Trafficking: A Global Perspective (Cambridge 2010), 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.

Dr. Shelley is also an editor (with Sally Stoecker) of Human Traffic and Transnational Crime: Eurasian and American Perspectives. From 1995-2014, she ran programs in Russia, Ukraine and Georgia with leading specialists on the problems of organized crime and corruption. She has testified repeatedly before Congress. Professor Shelley served on the Global Agenda Council on Illicit Trade and Organized Crime of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and was the first co-chair of its Council on Organized Crime. Professor Shelley is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

She has spoken at various international fora and at many universities both in the United States and abroad on transnational crime, terrorism, human trafficking, illicit trade and corruption. She testifies before Congress on many aspects of transnational crime and its relationship to terrorism. Additionally, she often appears on television and radio, including appearances on CNN, NPR’s Marketplace and Takeaway, PBS, A&E, the History Channel, C-span, Tavis Smiley, Kojo Nnamdi and 60 Minutes as well as in the European media such as BBC, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Die Welt.