Sandra Grady
Adjunct Associate Professor - Center for Security Studies (CSS)
Dr. Sandra Grady is an adjunct professor the Security Studies Program (SSP) where she has taught courses in African security and Disinformation. She also serves as the Senior Program Mission Manager at the Foreign Malign Influence Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. In that role, she engages in strategic vision, direction, and planning to advance unifying US national security strategies on foreign malign influence.
As an analyst at the National Counterterrorism Center, Dr. Grady focused on Eastern and Southern Africa, and as a strategist she worked on East Africa and diasporic communities in the Homeland. She is currently conducting ethnographic field work on violence reduction efforts in a Somali refugee community in the US, a population she previously studied in her book, Improvised Adolescence: Somali Bantu Teens Coming of Age in America, which was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2015.
Prior to working at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Dr. Grady earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate Program in Folklore & Folklife. In addition to working in the tech sector, she helped establish the fiscal and human resource development office for a Catholic religious community working in human development in Kenya, Malawi, and Zambia.