Katerina Siira

Deputy Director 

Katerina Siira, Deputy Director of the NYU Peace Research and Education Program (PREP), brings over 15 years of experience in peacebuilding and humanitarian aid across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. She bridges academic, practitioner, and policy spaces, collaborating with governmental institutions, universities, and local organizations to develop community-led initiatives in challenging contexts. Specializing in localization and participatory processes, her expertise spans from grassroots youth programming to high-level policy engagement.

Katerina leads PREP’s work in Colombia. She designs and facilitates the program’s work with universities, researchers and youth in Moldova, Iraq, and Libya, and helps to oversee the PREP’s overall development. Prior to shifting her focus to peacebuilding, Katerina worked with the UN Refugee Agency and the United States Refugee Admissions Program in sub-Saharan Africa, where she led refugee resettlement missions throughout the continent and oversaw the child protection program.

Katerina is an adjunct instructor at NYU’s Center for Global affairs, where she teaches the Joint Research Seminar in Peacebuilding and Advanced joint Research Seminar in Peacebuilding, an interactive set of courses that bring together researchers from NYU and the Escuela Superior de Administración Pública (ESAP) to develop and implement peace research in rural Colombia.

She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Government from Skidmore College and an M.S. in Global Affairs from NYU.   

EMAIL: KATERINA.SIIRA@NYU.EDU