Headlines at Hopkins
News Release

Office of News and Information
Johns Hopkins University
901 South Bond Street, Suite 540
Baltimore, Maryland 21231
Phone: 443-287-9960 | Fax: 443-287-9920

June 26, 2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Dennis O'Shea
443-287-9960
[email protected]


Johns Hopkins Graduate Student Killed in Iraq
Nicole
Suveges
Nicole Suveges

Political scientist Nicole Suveges was civilian Army contractor Nicole Suveges, a Johns Hopkins University graduate student in political science who was working in Iraq while doing research for her dissertation, was among four Americans killed in an explosion Tuesday in the offices of the district council in the critical Sadr City section of Baghdad.

Two U.S. soldiers, a State Department employee, an Italian translator working for the Defense Department, and six Iraqis also were killed, according to news reports.

Suveges, 38, was in Iraq as a civilian political scientist working in the Army's Human Terrain System program, advising the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 4th Infantry Division, according to BAE Systems, the company that employed her. BAE said she helped Army leaders in efforts to reduce violence in Sadr City and rebuild local infrastructure. Her knowledge and experience, including a previous tour in Iraq as a civilian contractor and her time as an Army reservist serving in Bosnia in the 1990s, reportedly made her especially effective in working to improve the lives of everyday Iraqis.

"Nicole was committed to using her learning and experience to make the world a better place, especially for people who have suffered through war and conflict," William R. Brody, president of the university, said in a message Wednesday night to the campus community. "In that, she exemplifies all that we seek to do at Johns Hopkins: to use knowledge for the good of humanity."

Mark Blyth, an associate professor of political science and Suveges' primary faculty advisor, said she came to Johns Hopkins early in the decade, took her comprehensive examinations about two years later and worked with Blyth for about two years as managing editor of the Review of International Political Economy. At first, he said, she planned to write her Ph.D. dissertation on how ideas move across borders from society to society, exploring, how radical Islamic ideas filtered through Western European mosques and how, in comparison, free market ideas filtered through Eastern European think-tanks into policy aking.

After the outbreak of the war in Iraq, however, Suveges changed her plans, Blyth said, switching to a topic that had interested her since her experience in Bosnia, where she worked in the multinational SFOR/NATO Combined Joint Psychological Operations Task Force. Her new research focus, Blyth said, was the process of transition from an authoritarian regime to democracy, and especially how that process affects ordinary citizens.

In about 2006, Blyth said, she spent a year in Iraq as a civilian contractor and social science adviser to the military and came back with public opinion data to analyze for her Ph.D. dissertation. Her current tour was expected to provide the final data she needed to begin writing her thesis. Blyth said he did not know how long she had intended to remain in Iraq this time.

"She was a very bright, engaging, sweet person, very intellectually curious," Blyth said Wednesday night shortly after learning of his student's death. Like others in the department, he was stunned by the news. "Two hours ago, I thought she was fine and I thought she was going to come back and defend her dissertation," he said.

Other members of the Political Science Department also described Nicole as an extraordinarily bright, kind and outgoing. She also was known as an active citizen of the department, regularly attending seminars and — in the words of one faculty member — acting as a a "magnet" for other graduate students and helping to organize their activities. As a former Army Reserve soldier and an older student, she brought a different and valuable perspective to the intellectual life of the department, faculty members said. Suveges grew up in Illinois, where reportedly she attended Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire and Mundelein High School in Mundelein. She graduated from the University of Illinois in Chicago in 1992 and earned a master's degree in international affairs in 1998 from George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Suveges' death was the third in a little over a year of a member of the Johns Hopkins community serving in Iraq. In the spring of 2007, Lt. Colby Umbrell '04 and Capt. Jonathan Grassbaugh '03, both of the U.S. Army, were killed in action there.

"Their deaths and Nicole's diminish us all," Brody said. "But their lives — lives devoted to service to others — honor us and our university. We are better for their having been among us."

Related Web sites:
> BAE Systems news release
> Announcement from Army Human Terrain System program
> Information on Funeral Arrangements