Gary Shiffman

The career of Gary Shiffman, MA Economics '01, PhD ‘02, has spanned military, government, academia, and business, and it has been fueled by a desire to understand human behavior.

Shiffman earned his undergraduate degree in psychology and embarked on a career with the U.S. Navy. The experience offered him a front row seat to some pivotal world events. “I was on the first U.S. Navy ships to visit the People’s Republic of China – it was May of 1989. I felt welcomed; it was a wonderful visit,” he recalled. “And three weeks later, tanks rolled through Tiananmen Square,” where hundreds to thousands of protesters were killed in a violent government shutdown of pro-Democracy demonstrations.

“A year later, I went to the Gulf War,” he continued. “This kid who’s interested in human behavior, I travel around the world, and I see bad and violent human behavior, and that all came together for me that this is what I want to work on.”

Shiffman continued his military career at the Pentagon, and enrolled at Georgetown University, where he earned his master’s degree in security studies. Reconciling his coursework in international relations theory with his understanding of political theory and human behavior, a friend advised him to consider economics, and introduced him to Mason economics professor Tyler Cowen.

“This was one of those pivotal moments in your career, when you get advice that resonates,” Shiffman said. “I think Tyler’s comment to me was, ‘You’d be welcome in economics.’ Someone with my interests, and my background, and the academic literature that resonated with me versus the stuff that didn’t. That’s how I found George Mason and economics. I was a part-time PhD student while working in the national security community in Washington, DC.”

Following his doctoral program, Shiffman returned to Georgetown to teach in the School of Foreign Service. While there, he served as the Chief of Staff, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and he founded two businesses that wed machine learning with behavioral science: he is the founder, CEO, and chair of the board of Giant Oak, Inc., and is the co-founder, CEO, and a board member of Consilient.

“In a big data world, machine learning helps us detect patterns of human behavior,” he explained. "So if I want to help government agencies and banks and financial institutions identify money launderers and human traffickers and drug traffickers, I take the economics and the machine learning and I bring them together, and I can do orders of magnitude better in terms of accuracy and efficiency. It’s a way to supercharge behavioral science so that it can empower those engaged in national security.”

Shiffman is the author of two books, Economic Instruments of Security Policy: Influencing the Choices of Leaders (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and The Economics of Violence: How Behavioral Science Can Transform Our View of Crime, Insurgency, and Terrorism (Cambridge University Press, 2020). He publishes regularly in The Hill, and has been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and other outlets.

Originally published in the CHSS Annual Report 2021-22