Kerry Chávez, PhD, is an assistant professor at the Institute for Future Conflict and an advisor for Irregular Warfare Initiative’s Air and Space Power focus area. Previously, she was a two-time nonresident research fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point and a nonresident research fellow at the Institute for Global Affairs. She is the chair of the Future Conflict Minor working group, and she designs and teaches courses on adversary doctrine and disruptive tech. Dr. Chávez also oversees the IDE/ILE fellows and the nonresident research fellows programs at the IFC.

Dr. Chávez’s research centers on politics, strategies, and emerging technologies of warfare, especially unmanned systems, artificial intelligence, autonomy, and relevant enabling technologies. Her work bridges academic and practitioner communities, combining rigorous theory and mixed methods with policy-relevant analysis. She has two novel datasets. Military Operations with Novel Strategic Technologies in r (MONSTr) offers a comprehensive list of US military operations from 1989 to January 2021 featuring the means of force used, geocoded locations, combatant rosters, and information on structural dependencies between events within campaigns and wars. Her dataset on violent nonstate actor drone adoption has received international attention and is considered a cornerstone in understanding quantitative trends on this phenomenon. She has published widely and collaborates regularly in leading academic and policy venues, including multiple wings of NATO, the UN, intelligence agencies, the Global Counterterrorism Forum, and DARPA.