Dr. Nicole Behnam is currently the Senior Technical Director for the Violence Prevention and Response Unit at the International Rescue Committee. The VPRU supports child protection, legal protection of refugees, and protection of women and other vulnerable groups in conflict and crisis settings.
Before that she served as the Orphans and Vulnerable Children Senior Advisor at the PEPFAR Office of the Global HIV/AIDS Coordinator (OGAC) at the US Department of State. Previous to this position she was a Senior Technical Advisor for child protection for World Vision and before that she was a TA for International Rescue Committee, and a Child Protection and Development specialist at World Relief. Her work has focused on programs responding to violence against women, children and their families, and she has worked and lived in places as varied as Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Mozambique and Jordan, and supported programs from Darfur to Afghanistan to South Sudan.
Nicole has a MA degree in German Literature from Harvard, a MA in international development and economics from Johns Hopkins, and a PhD in education from the University of Pennsylvania.