Dr. Bianca L. Adair serves as a Clinical Assistant Professor of Practice and the Director of Intelligence Studies. She retired from the Central Intelligence Agency in 2022 where she served as an Operations Officer in the Directorate of Operations, which included working as the Resident Intelligence Officer at The University of Texas at Austin. During her federal government service, she held leadership positions in Washington, DC, and foreign field posts. Her foreign postings included work in the Middle East and North Africa. She specialized in security, counterintelligence, counterterrorism, and foreign policy concerns with a special focus on Iran.

Dr. Adair has published most recently in Comparative Strategy and Studies in Intelligence. She is currently co-editing and contributing to a compilation book for publication with Routledge on comparative foreign intelligence services with Dr. Kiril Avramov from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to her government service, she published her research on communist-era Hungary in East European Quarterly, Problems of Communism, and Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics.

Dr. Adair is the recipient of an “Outstanding Contribution to the Literature of Intelligence” award from the CIA for her research on the role of Rear Admiral Sidney Souers in the framing of CIA’s authorities on covert action. She also previously received a Fulbright Research Grant on Austrian-Hungarian Relations for research on the relationship between Austria and Hungary during the Cold War. She regularly uses her language abilities in Persian (Farsi), French, German, and Hungarian for her research.