Dr. William ‘Bill’ Godnick joined the Perry Center as Professor of Practice in September 2016 after serving nearly a decade as Public Security Program Coordinator for the United Nations Regional Centre for Peace, Disarmament and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean based out of Lima, Peru and covering all countries of the region. Prior, Dr. Godnick worked as a Senior Policy Advisor for Latin America with the London-based NGO International Alert working on the role of the local private sector in peacebuilding and conflict-sensitive business practices and human rights in the oil and mining industries in Colombia and Guatemala. He began his career in the early 1990s as a Peace Corps volunteer working on small business development in a small community outside of San Pedro Sula, Honduras.

Bill holds a BS in International Business from San Francisco State University (1992) and an MA in International Policy Studies from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (1997). In 2010, he completed his PhD from the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom. His doctoral dissertation was titled "An examination of the impact of voluntary weapons collection programs on citizen security in Latin America." Dr. Godnick has taught graduate and undergraduate students at the American University School of International Service, Barry University's Department of History and Political Science, the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and the Institute for Global Learning at California State University Monterey Bay.

Dr. Godnick currently contributes to the Perry Center academic offerings on human rights and the rule of law; defense governance and strategy; and combating transnational threat networks. He has served as an adviser on national security strategy development for the governments of Barbados and the Dominican Republic. He is frequent speaker at the Inter American Defense College and provides support to the US Southern Command’s annual Central American and Caribbean Security Conferences and the Human Rights Initiative.

Dr. Godnick has lived in the Bahamas, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Peru and worked in more than 20 countries of the Western Hemisphere. His research interests are varied in the fields of national security and grand strategy, defense, governance, public security, transnational threats and human rights. He is fluent in Spanish.