Dr. Robert Muggah specializes in public and international security, smart cities, climate resilience and digital transformation. He is co-founder of the Igarapé Institute - a "think and do" tank working at the intersection of public, digital and climate security across Latin America and Africa. He is also co-founder of the SecDev Group - a digital risk analytics company. From 2000-2010, Robert was a senior research and research director of the Small Arms Survey in Geneva. For more than two decades he has advised national and municipal governments, technology companies and international organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and others on topics ranging from data-driven crime prevention and disarmament, demobilization and reintegration to urban planning in fragile and conflict-affected settings.

Robert is (or has been) a fellow or faculty at the University of Princeton, University of Oxford, the University of San Diego, the University of British Columbia, the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, and the Graduate Institute in Switzerland. Since 2016 he has advised the World Economic Forum's Council on Cities and the annual flagship publication, the Global Risk Report. He has served on several high level UN panels, including on issues of Youth, Peace and Security, and contributed to several flagship publications of groups like the OECD, UNDP, WHO and the World Bank. He is currently advising a range of start-ups and venture capital firms, on issues ranging from adversarial AI, crowd-sourced intelligence, biodiversity prospecting and Web 3.0.

Robert has authored eight books and hundreds of peer-review journals. His h-index is currently 43 and i10-index 165. His latest book, with Ian Goldin, was released by Penguin/Random House in 2020 and is now available in Chinese, Dutch, German, Japanese, Korean and other languages. Robert is a regular columnist with Foreign Policy and a regular contributor to the The Atlantic, BBC, CBC, CNN, Economist, FastCompany, Financial Times, Folha de Sao Paulo, Globo, Guardian, New York Times, Newsweek and Wired. He has delivered three TED talks, in 2014, 2017 and 2021. He is now working on a new crime thriller series set in the Amazon Basin. Robert received his DPhil from the University of Oxford and his MPhil from the University of Sussex.