Gillian Brand is a graduate student in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and a research assistant at CPOST. She studied International Affairs and Political Science at the University of Nevada, Reno, and graduated in 2018. Her research focuses on the Syrian civil war and the Syrian refugee crisis. Gillian is currently working as part of the Minerva Project Team on creating provincial profiles about Afghanistan so that they can be analyzed in conjunction with Taliban propaganda. She expects to graduate in the spring of 2020.