John Stevenson is currently a principal research scientist at NSI, Inc. Prior to this, he was a lead investigator and senior researcher on the Strategic Multilayer Assesment (SMA) Projects at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). John completed his Ph.D. (2014) and M.A. (2007) in Political Science at the University of Chicago, and an A.B. in Government from Dartmouth College in 2005. Having a passion for teaching and methodology, John taught in START's online terrorism graduate certificate, and, with various START colleagues, designed and delivered training on qualitative and quantitative data analysis for national security professionals.

John has studied a range of research subjects relating to political violence, including terrorism, other kinds of non-state actor violence, mass killing/genocide, state/institution building, state failure and the effects of foreign third-party involvement in conflict and disputes. Prior to coming to START, at the University of Chicago, Stevenson led numerous research consortiums (one, named “PIPES” focused on international economic and security affairs and the other focused on political communication), created a working group to develop the technical policy writing and methodological products of his junior colleagues and provided written and oral feedback on hundreds of book and article-length projects in various conference, classroom and consortium settings.