Marc Sageman

Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Research Institute
Center on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism, and Homeland Security

Marc Sageman, Senior Fellow, is an independent researcher on terrorism and the founder of Sageman Consulting, LLC. He holds various academic positions at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Maryland, and national think tanks including FPRI and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

After graduating from Harvard, he obtained an M.D. and a Ph.D. in sociology from New York University. After a tour as a flight surgeon in the U.S. Navy, he joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1984. He spent a year on the Afghan Task Force then went to Islamabad from 1987 to 1989, where he ran the U.S. unilateral programs with the Afghan Mujahedin, and New Delhi from 1989–91. In 1991, he resigned from the agency to return to medicine. He completed a residency in psychiatry at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1994, he has been in the private practice of forensic and clinical psychiatry and has had the opportunity to evaluate about 500 murderers.

After 9/11, he started collecting biographical material on about 400 Al Qaeda terrorists to test the validity of the conventional wisdom on terrorism. This research has been published as Understanding Terror Networks (University of Pennsylvania Press 2004) and Leaderless Jihad (UPP, 2007). As an expert on Al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations, he has consulted with various branches of the U.S. government, including the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, the Combatant Commanders, the National Laboratories, the Department of Homeland Security, various agencies in the U.S. intelligence community, the U.S. Secret Service, the New York Police Department, and various other law enforcement agencies. He has lectured at many universities, including Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, MIT, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, the University of California at Berkeley, and Johns Hopkins University. He has also consulted with foreign government (France, Australia, Spain, Canada, Germany, Britain) and lectured extensively at foreign universities.

Marc Sageman
Senior Fellow
Center on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism, and Homeland Security
Foreign Policy Research Institute
1528 Walnut Street, Suite 610
Philadelphia, PA 19102 USA