Lawrence Woocher

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Lawrence Woocher is research director for the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide. He previously served as senior atrocity prevention fellow with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), where he supported the agency’s participation on the Atrocities Prevention Board, authored the Field Guide: Helping Prevent Mass Atrocities (PDF; external link), developed a new training module on atrocity prevention, and co-led the development of a new State Department–USAID Atrocity Assessment Framework.

Prior to his USAID fellowship, Lawrence was research director for the Political Instability Task Force at Science Applications International Corporation, where he led efforts to enhance forecasting of regime change, civil war, mass killing, and other kinds of political violence worldwide. From 2006 to 2011, he was a senior program officer at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), where he served as a member of the executive committee and lead expert on early warning for the Genocide Prevention Task Force, which was co-sponsored by the Museum and co-chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Secretary of Defense William Cohen. Before joining USIP, he was a research fellow at Columbia University’s Center for International Conflict Resolution and, concurrently, a consultant on early warning to the Office of the Special Adviser to the UN Secretary-General on the Prevention of Genocide.

Lawrence is a lecturer at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University and a graduate of Brown and Harvard Universities.