Director, Infrastructure, Immigration, & Security Operations Program, RAND Homeland Security Research Division; Senior Policy Researcher; Professor of Policy Analysis, Pardee RAND Graduate School
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Shelly Culbertson is a senior policy researcher at RAND, a professor of policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, and director of the Infrastructure, Immigration, & Security Operations Program (IISO), part of the RAND Homeland Security Research Division. IISO supports eight organizations inside the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with strategic analysis on infrastructure security and resilience, immigration policy and enforcement, maritime policy, and security issues.
Culbertson's research focuses on immigration policy, disaster recovery, post-conflict recovery, mass migration, refugees, and international development. She has led multiple studies about mass migration, with particular focus on education, jobs, security, return conditions, and technology. She led a disaster recovery implementation plan for the U.S. Virgin Islands, sponsored by FEMA, a study on municipal recovery capacities needed for recovery in Puerto Rico, and a study on post-conflict stabilization of Mosul, Iraq after the operations against ISIS. Her international development work has focused on education policy in the Middle East. She coled a multi-year effort to advise the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq on improving education and coordinated RAND's project to design programs for the Qatar National Research Fund, which has now awarded over a billion dollars in research grants.
Prior to RAND, Culbertson worked at the U.S. State Department on Turkey and at LMI Government Consulting. Her commentaries have appeared in Foreign Policy, The National Interest, The Hill, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, and other news outlets, and she has conducted media interviews on MSNBC, NPR, BBC World, and elsewhere. Culbertson is the author of The Fires of Spring: A Post Arab Spring Journey Through the Turbulent New Middle East (St. Martin's Press). She earned her M.P.A. in public policy and international development from the School for Public and International Affairs, Princeton University.
M.P.A. in public policy and international development, Princeton University School for Public and International Affairs; B.Phil. in political science and philosophy, University of Pittsburgh; B.S. in mathematics, University of Pittsburgh
