Dr. George Gavrilis is Executive Director of the Hollings Center for International Dialogue in Washington, DC and senior research scholar at Columbia University in New York. His research is in the fields of border management, international assistance to post-conflict states, and politics and economy of the Middle East and Central Asia.

In 2008-09 he served as an International Affairs Fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations and worked with the United Nations on various policy initiatives on Central Asia and Afghanistan. He previously taught international relations and comparative politics in the Department of Government at the University of Texas-Austin, directed research for the CFR Oral History Project at Columbia University, and served as a National Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University.

He is author of The Dynamics of Interstate Boundaries (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and has published articles in Foreign Affairs and The New York Times on Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Israel and the West Bank.