START senior researcher Timothy Clancy brings a unique blend of expertise to his role, focusing on the complexities of violence and instability through innovative modeling and simulation (M&S) techniques. At START, he continues to push the boundaries of research on violent radicalization, the terror contagion hypothesis, emerging-state actors in warfare, and integrating AI with computer simulations for modeling social complexity.
1. How did you become interested in your field of study?
I have always been interested in the nature of violence and the instability it creates in society. However, I flunked out of math in high school and again in college, leading 20-year-old me to believe I was “bad at math.” School and science “was not for me.”
I dropped out of college and made a career solving problems through methods like Lean and Six Sigma. I returned to school in my 30’s, earning business and history degrees scratching my itch by studying ethnic cleansings, revolutions, and civil wars. However, my professional career was going well, so it remained just an itch. I joined IBM as a consultant, working on enterprise transformation and strategic problems at Fortune 100, government agencies, and military commands. A stint at the US Army Chief of Staff led to an assignment at the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). The higher I went up, the more the problems I faced were embedded in complex systems – making them harder to explain or solve than the tools I had learned.
In 2011, at OSD, I volunteered to support counter-IED efforts in Afghanistan as a civilian accompanying the force. While deployed, my interests in problem-solving, complex systems, and the nature of conflict converged, realizing I could use my skills to reduce violence and instability. While there, I stumbled across the modeling and simulation (M&S) science of system dynamics. System dynamics provides a language, grammar, and syntax to rigorously analyze problems in complex systems by making qualitative system structures and quantitative computer simulations.
Returning from Afghanistan, I became the Chief Methodologist of Lean, Six Sigma, and Agile at IBM, but my heart was no longer in it. I made a midlife career change, leaving IBM to focus 100% on learning system dynamics to build simulations for business and government stakeholders. I earned an MSc in Simulation Science & Insurgency Dynamics in 2016, and a PhD in System Dynamics focused on the Lifecycle of Violence and Instability of Non-State Actors in 2023.
2. How did you first get involved with START?
I returned from my last deployment in Afghanistan in late 2012, and during my downtime, the mass shooting at Sandy Hook happened. I wanted to apply a similar analysis we did for counter-IED to mass shootings but was frustrated by the lack of high-quality databases like the World Wide Incident Tracking System (WWITS) we used to study roadside bombs. Several years later, having begun my PhD at WPI in 2016, I found START’s Global Terrorism Dataset (GTD), which was exactly what I was looking for, and the GTD became one of my primary datasets.
That is all I knew of START until I saw a senior researcher opening in late 2023. They had a position focused on M&S of asymmetric threats – so I applied for the position, not knowing much about the lab or the school beyond GTD. Joining START, I learned that WWITS influenced the GTD early. The lab is a great place to work, and it turns out that UMD is not some fly-by-night university. Terrapin Strong!
3. Who has been the most influential person during your academic pursuits?
During my PhD, it was my advisor, Khalid Saeed of WPI. Khalid has a deep appreciation of how the structure of complex systems generates problem behaviors and how understanding that structure can help us both create simulations of the system and identify policy solutions to solve the problem. Khalid was the kind of advisor who could give you a system thinking concept to mull over, and I would put that ‘jagged rock’ of an idea in my rock tumbler brain, working on it for months (or years!) until I came out with a polished insight and a deeper understanding of complex systems. Other academic influences also blended systems thinking and pragmatic problem-solving approaches with an ability to distill complex ideas and communicate them to large audiences, including Dana Meadows, George F.R. Ellis, Jay Forrester, David Kilcullen, and Erica Chenoweth.
4. What has been one of the more interesting projects you have worked on?
Probably the ‘lifecycle’ approach to non-state actor violence from my dissertation. It provides a continuum for understanding radicalization and violence from individual lone-wolf actors who then form into small cell teams, clandestine terror networks, up to insurgencies, and emerging state actors. The work has produced two hypotheses, each based on a computer simulation. The terror contagion hypothesis describes a specific kind of violent radicalization spreading through cultural scripts as a social contagion resulting in repeated public mass killings such as Columbine-style school shootings. The emerging-state actor model (E-SAM) simulates asymmetric conflict left of fully conventional between a state and a non-state actor and can replicate everything from mass resistance movements such as the Arab Spring or Euromaidan up through irregular warfare practiced by emerging-state actors such as ISIS and the Taliban. Both hypotheses and simulations remain relevant to problems we see in the news today from how disinformation can spread radicalization and ongoing, current, and brewing conflicts between state and non-state actors.
5. What are you currently working on?
The biggest part of my work examines how we can use M&S and artificial intelligence (AI) to explore social complexity in national security topics, a mouthful of concepts I have begun calling Nat-Sec MAISC ( pronounced “mask.”) Fundamental research in Nat-Sec MAISC may look at how we can create frameworks for better integration of AI and M&S into national security wargames, while applied research might seek to create simulation models on topics of social complexity: societal resilience to adversarial tampering, institutional resilience to competitive pressures, will to fight, radicalization and extremism.
However, I am fortunate at START that my prior research interests overlap almost perfectly with my current work. The terror contagion hypothesis and emerging-state actor theory fit within Nat-Sec MAISC, and I continue to work and publish in both streams.
6. Is there a specific research gap that you are interested in studying?
The biggest research gap that interests me is how to help people understand and navigate the complex systems they encounter in their everyday environments. Whether we work in corporate, intelligence, military, healthcare, industry, or other sectors – we all run into complex systems. There is a lack of methods for professionals, managers, and leaders in these contexts who may not have math or science backgrounds to understand our complex systems and navigate them to solve problems.
Another interesting gap is how M&S can support AI to improve once the current generative AI hype cycle plays out. Using M&S to fine-tune AI models, providing self-playing learning labs for AI to practice in, and providing better explainability for AI decision-making are big topics in this M&S-supported AI area.
7. What is the most exciting experience you have had due to your research?
I began my MSc at WPI in 2012 while deployed in Afghanistan, so it is hard to top that in terms of ‘excitement.’ I would download class lectures in the morale tent, the only place we had private internet access, watch them, do the homework on my laptop in my bunk, and upload them back up the next week in the morale tent. Meanwhile, during the week, I would apply what I had learned to the work I had to do, meaning there was a strong and immediate connection between learning and doing.
However, more recently, my most exciting experience has been gathering evidence about predictions made from the terror contagion hypothesis. It is a novel hypothesis – so regardless of whether the evidence confirms or challenges our predictions, it again provides a strong connection between the abstractions of research in systems science to the real-life problems we study, like terrorism or violence.
8. What are your plans for the future?
I hope to continue working at UMD START until they kick me out. It is a great environment in a great location working in an area I love. Eventually, I would like to carve out maybe an M&S-focused lab offering graduate courses in system dynamics for UMD and DMV-area students and professionals. Very few schools currently offer that, and almost none outside of West Point catering to a national security-focused population. I also have a consulting firm, Dialectic Simulations Consulting, LLC, which provides systems thinking training and custom simulation development.
9. Outside of work, what do you do for fun?
Because of my age and experiences, I have been blessed to meld my interests with my work, so I am probably a bad example of work/life balance. I have a treadmill at home with a computer on it and will walk 12-18 miles a day “working” even on my days off. Outside of START, I run Dialectic, a blog called the InfoMullet which also has a YouTube channel, whose motto is “TLDR UpFront, Full Context in the Back!” I also volunteer time working to counter harassment, toxicity, and assault in volunteer organizations and community groups. I am an avid Go player and love teaching and playing!
10. What is your favorite part about your job?
Probably the part where for a kid who flunked out of math (twice), I now have an MSc and PhD in applied mathematics and doing active research in an area that’s always been of interest. If 20-year-old me could meet 50-year-old me, I think he would approve.
Learn more about Timothy Clancy here.
Figure 1: Simplified Terror Contagion Hypothesis of Public Mass Killings
Figure 2: Example Model Structure of Civilian Sentiment within Sentiments Module of E-SAM
Figure 3: Modules in the Emerging-State Actor Model (E-SAM)