Dr. Louise Shelley is the founder and Director of the Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC), and a leading United States expert on organized crime and corruption in the former Soviet Union. Dr. Shelley is a Professor in the Department of Justice, Law and Society (School of Public Affairs) and the School of International Service at American University.

Dr. Shelley is the author of Policing Soviet Society (Routledge, 1996), Lawyers in Soviet Worklife and Crime and Modernization, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on all aspects of transnational crime and corruption. She serves on the editorial board of Demokratizatsiya: the Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, and The International Annals of Criminology. She was elected to the Board of Directors of the International Society of Criminology for the years 1999-2003. Her expertise in transnational crime and corruption includes money laundering and illicit financial flows, human smuggling and trafficking, national security issues, and the use of information technology by international crime groups.

Since 1995, Dr. Shelley has run programs in Russia and more recently in Ukraine with leading specialists on the problems of organized crime and corruption. She has also been the principal investigator of large-scale projects on money laundering from Russia, Ukraine and Georgia and of training of law enforcement persons on the issue of trafficking in persons. She has testified repeatedly before the U.S. Congress on such topics as transnational crime, terrorism and the impact of international crime on financial markets. Dr. Shelley has testified before the House Committee on International Relations Committee and the House Banking Committee regarding the Bank of New York money-laundering case. She has spoken at various international fora and at many universities both in the United States and abroad on transnational crime and corruption. Additionally, she appears on television and radio, including CNN, NPR's Marketplace, PBS, A&E, the History Channel and 60 Minutes.

Dr. Shelley received her undergraduate degree (cum laude) form Cornell University in Penology and Russian Literatures. She holds an M.A. in Criminology and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. She studied at the law faculty of Moscow State University on IREX and Fulbright Fellowships. In 1993, she held a Fulbright in Mexico. The same year she was a visiting professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Trento, Italy teaching on international organized crime. She is also the recipient of Guggenheim, NED, and Kennan Institute grants and received a MacArthur Foundation grant to establish the Russian Organized Crime Study Centers. In 1992, she was Scholar-Teacher of the year at American University. She has held U.S. State Department Speaker and Academic Consultant grants in Thailand, Argentina and Honduras.