About Me
Dr. Rob Grace’s research interests include civilian protection, the laws of war, international human rights, humanitarianism, and armed conflict. Dr. Grace is the Lead Researcher for Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict and a member of the Beyond Compliance Consortium, a collaboration between academic and practitioner organizations to build evidence on promoting restraint by armed actors during war. He also holds a faculty position at University of San Diego, where he teaches a virtual course on humanitarian diplomacy.
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Previously, Dr. Grace was a USIP-Minerva Peace Scholar at the United States Institute of Peace, as well as a Graduate Research Fellow and a Summer Fellow at the Harvard Program on Negotiation. He has also led or co-led policy-oriented research projects on humanitarian-military relations at the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies at the Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs at Brown University. Dr. Grace’s professional experience also includes serving as Senior Associate at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, where he led a multi-year research project on fact-finding related to human rights and international humanitarian law; co-hosted and produced monthly webcasts on humanitarian action; and developed e-learning modules for the Humanitarian Academy at Harvard. He has also contributed to research projects at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, Global Interagency Security Forum, and Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Additionally, he has taught graduate, undergraduate, and pre-college courses on humanitarian action and armed conflict at Tufts University, Brown University, Brandeis University, and Boston University.
Dr. Grace’s research and writing has been published by the Journal of International Humanitarian Action, Journal of Humanitarian Affairs, Journal of International Humanitarian Legal Studies, Conflict and Health, Negotiation Journal, and World Health and Population, among others. He holds a PhD in political science from Brown University, an MA in politics from New York University, and a BA from Vassar College.