Meredith Stricker serves as the Chief of Staff for the University of Chicago Crime Lab and Education Lab. Ms. Stricker is also a Senior Fellow at The Soufan Center. Before joining the University of Chicago, Stricker was the founding Executive Director of The Soufan Center; a think tank focused on global security and emerging threats. Ms. Stricker led the Soufan Center’s research team and speaker series, building on years of experience with counter-terrorism and other security matters. Stricker’s work with policymakers, philanthropists, and practitioners in the field has led her to formally present on security concerns to Governments, including Heads of State, Ambassadors and Ministers, and at international forums, including at the United Nations, and at conferences around the world.

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Ms. Stricker has over fifteen years of experience in the human rights, peace and security, and development sectors, working on gender policies and economic development programs in the United States, East, and West Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. As the Program Director of the Peace and Security Funders Group (PSFG), based in Washington D.C., Stricker acted as a government liaison and advisor for a network of foundations and philanthropists, some of the largest in the world, that give hundreds of millions of dollars in annual giving in the peace and security sector.

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Before joining PSFG, Ms. Stricker was the Executive Director of the Zameer Foundation; a small private family foundation focused on innovative educational opportunities and resource mobilization for orphans and vulnerable children in four states in India. Previous to her work in India, Ms. Stricker served as Country Director for Transitions, an anti-sex trafficking organization based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where she advocated on behalf of survivors and ran a school and shelter for teenage girls. She has also worked in East and West Africa on women’s economic empowerment projects, women’s property rights initiatives, and with non-profits focused on health care and social entrepreneurship.

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An Honors College scholar, Ms. Stricker has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a Master in International Affairs from Columbia University, where she earned the Dr. Susan Aurelia Gitelson Award for Human Values in International Affairs.