Jessica Stern

Jessica Eve Stern (born February 11, 1958) is an American scholar and academic on terrorism.

Stern serves as a research professor at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University.

Earlier she had been a lecturer at Harvard University.

She serves on the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law.

Stern was a postdoctoral analyst for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1992 to 1994, where she analyzed political developments in Russia that could put nuclear materials or fissile materials at risk for use by terrorists.

Stern is a member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.

She was named a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow, national fellow at the Hoover Institution, fellow of the World Economic Forum, and a Harvard MacArthur Fellow.

Stern served on President Bill Clinton's National Security Council staff from 1994 to 1995 as the director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian Affairs.

The character of Dr. Julia Kelly in the 1997 film The Peacemaker was partly based on Stern's work at the National Security Council.

From 1998 to 1999, she was the Superterrorism Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations; and from 1995 to 1996, she was a national fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where she is a member of the Task Force on National Security and Law.

Stern was a lecturer on counter-terrorism and law at Harvard Law School and Harvard Kennedy School from 1999 to 2016.

She has served on the advisory board of the American Bar Association Committee on Law Enforcement and National Security and the editorial boards of Current History and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Stern is currently a fellow at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, and she is an advanced academic candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis.

In 2001, she was featured in 'Time' magazine's series on Innovators.

In 2009, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work on trauma and violence.

In 2009, she was a fellow at the Guggenheim Foundation, the Yaddo Colony for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony and was also an Erikson Scholar at the Erik Erikson Institute.

Stern is a research professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies and Boston University.

In an article published in The Washington Post on 20 June 2010, Stern revealed that she believes the reason for her fascination with terrorism is due to terror that she experienced in her own life when she and her sister were raped at gunpoint by an intruder when Stern was aged 15 (her sister a year younger).

She also ascribes her lack of a normal fear reaction to this event and subsequently, which has been suggested to her by a therapist is due to post traumatic stress disorder.

Stern is Jewish and was the "child of a refugee and Holocaust survivor."

She resides in Cambridge with her husband Chester G. Atkins

Her book ISIS: The State of Terror (2015), was co-authored with J.M. Berger.

Stern is the co-author of ISIS: The State of Terror (2015) with J.M. Berger; Stern authored Denial: A Memoir of Terror (2010), Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (2004), and The Ultimate Terrorists (2001).

She has also published articles on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

Stern received recognition from the Federal Bureau of Investigation for her efforts against international terrorism.