Michael Spagat received the Ph.D. degree from Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. He has held faculty posts with Brown University, Providence, RI, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is currently a Professor of economics with the Royal Holloway College, University of London, Egham, U.K. His papers on armed conflict have been published in Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Peace Research, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and PLoS Medicine. His current research addresses universal patterns in modern war, the Dirty War Index civilian casualties in the Iraq conflict, and problems in the measurement of war deaths.