Our Team
Urszula Horoszko is a research associate professor and deputy director of the Corruption, Networks, and Transnational Crime Research Center (CONTRA). Her research examines migration and displacement, migrant and refugee health, NGOs in migration and health governance, and the privatization of migration systems, focusing on how networks of state and nonstate actors shape policy and humanitarian outcomes.
Horoszko brings more than 15 years of experience working across academia, government, and civil society, with a strong emphasis on collaboration and applied research. Her work is grounded in sustained partnerships with nongovernmental organizations, research institutions, and public-sector actors, and bridges academic research with policy engagement and practice. She has previously served as a senior program manager and as head of public diplomacy at the Embassy of the Republic of Poland, working closely with diplomats, policymakers, academic institutions, and civil society organizations on initiatives at the intersection of culture, science, and public policy.
Horoszko holds a PhD in communication from George Mason University and a PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Meng-Hao Li is Deputy Director of the Center for Biomedical Science and Policy and Adjunct Faculty at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. His research focuses on illicit trafficking networks, computational social science, and network analysis, with particular emphasis on transnational organized crime, drug trafficking, organ trafficking, and global illicit supply chains.
His work integrates large-scale data analytics, social network analysis, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to examine the structure, dynamics, and governance challenges of complex trafficking systems. He has developed computational approaches using open-source intelligence (OSINT), court records, and large administrative datasets to identify criminal relationships, trafficking routes, and cross-border network structures.
Li’s broader research interests include health policy, digital governance, and the application of AI and large language models to policy analysis and security research. His collaborative work has appeared in journals including BMJ Global Health, Social Science & Medicine, Trends in Organized Crime, JMIR AI, and JMIR Infodemiology. He received the Joseph L. Fisher Public Policy Award for his doctoral work in public policy at George Mason University.
Rajendra Kulkarni is a researcher at School of Public Policy. His research interests span multiple disciplines including complexity science, discrete nonlinear dynamical systems, blockchain, spatio-temporal systems, and network science with the focus on developing analytical models for research in public policy, regional science, and economics. His interdisciplinary approach seeks to bridge the gap between computational science and how it may be applied to policy design, particularly in understanding how localized disruptions propagate through global networks. Through this approach; his research addresses critical contemporary challenges in supply chain resilience, spatial economics, and institutional governance.
Wenshen Pan is a visiting PhD student at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, and a doctoral student in the School of International Development and Cooperation (SIDC) at the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE). Her research examines international development, global governance, and international political economy, with a specific focus on the role of non-state actors in transactional governance. Pan brings robust quantitative research experience to her work. Her empirical approach is grounded in data analysis and policy review, evaluating complex issues such as the impact of economic policy uncertainty on corporate investment and the role of venture capital in export supply chain diversification. Additionally, her academic interests extend to global value chains and digital business ecosystems.
Mariia Panga is a PhD candidate in Public Policy at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, where she has studied since 2021. Prior to her doctoral work, she served as a senior expert at the National Bank of Ukraine, where she contributed to financial stability and bank supervision. She holds an MA in Economic Analysis from the Kyiv School of Economics (2016). Her dissertation research examines how Russia’s affiliated illicit finance networks evade U.S. sanctions through the global offshore system, professional enablers, and financial secrecy, exposing systemic vulnerabilities in the international financial system.
Priya Sahu is a tax policy and anti–money laundering specialist with extensive experience in financial intelligence, investigation and regulatory frameworks. As a former Additional Director of the Financial Intelligence Unit–India, she has led national efforts on financial crime investigation, STR/SAR analysis, and international cooperation.
She has now transitioned into a researcher and consultant advising institutions such as the International Finance Corporation, United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Capital Development Fund. Her research explores trade-based money laundering, corruption, tax crimes, and the effectiveness of financial intelligence systems, focusing on how governance weaknesses and regulatory gaps enable illicit financial flows and transnational criminal networks across borders. Priya’s work bridges practitioner insight with scholarly inquiry to illuminate the political economy of financial crime in an evolving global security landscape.
Affiliates
Karen A. Greenaway, Attorney at Law, served more than 22 years in the FBI as both a Special Agent and a Supervisory Special Agent. During her career, she specialized in conducting and supervising transnational organized crime, money laundering, foreign bribery, and foreign corruption investigations related to Russia, the former Soviet Union, Central and Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. She also supervised and staffed investigative squads and temporarily assigned FBI investigators and analysts who worked bribery, corruption, and money laundering investigations with their counterparts in Ukraine. Since her retirement from the FBI in December 2018, she has worked as an expert witness and consultant on foreign corruption, money laundering, and asset recovery rule of law issues to private sector and civil society clients, as well as investigative journalists. She also has a regular media presence in print, online streaming, radio, and podcasts.
During her career and post-retirement, she has created and conducted training courses for civil activists, investigative journalists, and law enforcement, including prosecutors and judges. Her students have been from Central and Eastern Europe and Ukraine, as well as Asia and Africa. Her courses cover issues related to corruption, money laundering, criminal cybercrime, transnational organized crime, and asset recovery, with a focus on the conduct of investigations, government accountability and transparency and other related rule of law topics. During her time in the FBI and in retirement, she has worked in more than 40 countries. She is bi-lingual in Russian.
Tom Mueller is a freelance writer of nonfiction and fiction, currently a Senior Researcher at The New School, a Senior Research Fellow at the Vienna Centre for Societal Security, and an Affiliated Researcher at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm, Sweden. He studied at Oxford (DPhil, Rhodes Scholar), Harvard (BA, summa cum laude), and Alief Hastings High School in rural East Texas. He subsequently worked as an associate in mergers and acquisitions at Goldman Sachs in London and Frankfurt and studied classical guitar in Seville, Spain, with América Martínez, a disciple of Andrés Segovia. He has lived or worked in 51 countries.
His most recent book, How to Make a Killing (W. W. Norton, 2023), examines the U.S. healthcare system through the lens of the dialysis industry, where a miracle cure has become a nightmare for many patients. His previous books include Crisis of Conscience, a cultural history of whistleblowing and fraud, published in 2019 by Penguin Random House’s Riverhead imprint in the United States and by Atlantic Books in the UK and Commonwealth countries; and Extra Virginity, a New York Times bestselling account of olive oil culture, history, and crime, published by W. W. Norton.
His articles have appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and his work has been included in anthologies such as Best American Science Writing and Best American Travel Writing.
Camilo Pardo-Herrera is an international development scholar focusing on the political economy of development and its intersection with corruption, and political and criminal violence, all with a regional focus on Latin American.
His personal research agenda links different forms of organized crime, political violence, and corruption to development outcomes in the Latin American region. He has also done extensive work on the political economy of natural resource extraction in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
Pardo-Herrera brings an excellent combination of personal experience designing and implementing national-level policy to address organized crime and corruption, a profound commitment for evidence-based policy analysis and design, and strong analytical and methodological capacities to pose and answer complex development questions.
Prior to his academic life, he gathered more than 15 years of experience working on conflict management, post-conflict reconstruction, human rights issues, and natural resource management in the Latin American region. He did so while working for national governments, the civil society, and multilateral development organizations.
Pardo-Herrera finished his PhD in public policy at George Mason University and his master’s degree in democracy and democratization from the University College London thanks to a Chevening Scholarship awarded by the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
He has presented his research––among other places––at the World Bank, the Organization of American States, the United Nations, as well as at academic forums around Europe and the Americas.
Pardo-Herrera currently teaches at Texas Tech University–Costa Rica and consults on different economic development issues for private and multilateral organizations.
Fábio Ramazzini Bechara is a Brazilian prosecutor, scholar, and policy practitioner whose research focuses on transnational organized crime, illicit markets, money laundering and financial crime, international legal cooperation, and interagency governance. He is a career prosecutor with the São Paulo State Public Prosecutor’s Office and has extensive experience leading task forces and complex investigations involving transnational criminal organizations, as well as coordinating international cooperation with foreign law enforcement, prosecutorial, and intelligence agencies. He currently serves with the Department against Transnational Organized Crime of the Organization of American States (OAS), where his work includes regional research, policy development, and initiatives to strengthen cooperation against organized crime and money laundering.
Bechara is a professor in the Graduate Program in Political and Economic Law at Mackenzie Presbyterian University and a visiting professor at the University of São Paulo (USP), where he also chairs the Advisory Council of the School of Multidimensional Security at the Institute of International Relations. He completed postdoctoral research at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and holds a PhD in Procedural Law from USP and a master’s degree in Law from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo.
His current research project, “Normative, Institutional, and Operational Asymmetries in the Americas in Organized Crime, Money Laundering, and Fraud: Regional Impacts, a Study of Best Practices in Brazil, and Public Policy Recommendations,” examines regulatory, institutional, and operational differences across the region and their impact on organized crime and illicit financial flows. His broader research addresses financial intelligence, asset recovery, transnational investigations, international cooperation, and interinstitutional models for disrupting organized criminal networks.
Ilya Zaslavskiy is a specialist in due diligence, sanctions, kleptocracy, energy regulation, and political risks. His expertise spans anti-corruption, policy reform in the mineral extraction sector, corporate governance, climate change issues, and advocacy for robust policies countering post-Soviet kleptocracy, especially Kremlin-connected oligarchs and entities. His latest work includes research into kremligarchs under post-2022 sanctions, containment policy against Russian hybrid threats. He has been an active member of DC-based anti-corruption community since 2015. He has been working with the team of Prof. Janine Wedel as a consultant on Russian kleptocracy for several years.
Until last year, Zaslavskiy also worked as a senior campaigner with Razom We Stand, a Ukraine-based and internationally active peace, clean energy and climate organization. In prior roles, he was senior program manager at the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), head of research at DC-based Free Russia Foundation, fellow at Chatham House and Legatum Institute, and collaborated with the Atlantic Council, Hudson Institute, Martens Centre, and other leading think tanks. He also worked on climate change issues at a Danish company RCF, and in the gas business stream at TNK-BP in Moscow before 2010. He holds a BA degree in Modern History (First Class), an MPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford, and an Executive Master of Management in Energy from BI Norwegian Business School.