The International Security Professional Interest Council, in collaboration with the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Office of Career Advancement, will host a student seminar with Marisa Porges, International Security Program Fellow with the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Ms. Porges will speak on how to manage a career that crosses the divide between government agencies and the public-private-non-profit sectors, as well as answer questions from students.
Marisa Porges is a terrorism expert who previously served as a counterterrorism policy adviser in the U.S. Government. She worked at the U.S. Department of Defense, handling detention policy, and at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, crafting strategies to counter terrorist financing and corruption. Porges was also an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and served as an embedded civilian adviser at ISAF Headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan. She began her career on active duty in the U.S. Navy, flying the EA-6B Prowler.
Ms. Porges recent research on radicalization, ex-combatant reintegration and reconciliation, and detention operations includes rigorous fieldwork in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and more, interviewing government officials, ex-Taliban and former members of al Qaeda. She is currently working on a book that presents a new approach to evaluating government efforts to rehabilitate terrorists. Ms. Porges holds an A.B. in geophysics from Harvard, an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, and is a doctoral candidate at King's College London. Her work has been published in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the New York Times, and more.
