Professional Experience and Expertise

For over a decade, Krista has served as a Counterterrorism Officer at the US National Counterterrorism Center in positions that included branch chief, counterterrorism policy analyst, and watch officer Krista also served as a Federal Executive Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, where she researched and published on gendered approaches to countering violent extremism (CVE) in Morocco and Bangladesh.

Her passion and expertise in counterterrorism is in CVE and, more specifically, on prevention programs, believing that counterterrorism has evolved tremendously in the past decade and getting ahead of it with prevention is essential to countering all forms of violent extremism. In 2017, she also began serving in a new role as a CVE Subject Matter Expert at the International Center of Excellence on Countering Violent Extremism, Hedayah, a think/do tank on CVE. In this capacity, she works as an adviser on training and capacity building programs focused specifically on youth radicalization and reintegration, community engagement (e.g. community policing, prevention, reintegration & rehabilitation), and the role women and families play in CVE. Currently, she is working on finalizing curricula focused specifically on how practitioners can best support families affected by radicalization leading to violent extremism; one curriculum is aimed at psychologists and social workers and the other on law enforcement and criminal justice officials.

In her career, Krista has also worked for the US State Department in Africa, Asia and the Middle East on security, counter-narcotics and in fraud prevention.