Dipali Mukhopadhyay is an associate professor in the global policy area at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, as well as a Senior Expert on the Afghanistan Peace Process at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington DC.  Mukhopadhyay is the author of Warlords, Strongman Governors and State Building in Afghanistan (Cambridge, 2014). She was an Assistant and Associate Professor of International Affairs at SIPA from 2012-2020. Prior to joining SIPA and Saltzman, Mukhopadhyay spent 2011 as a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University. She has been conducting research in Afghanistan since 2007 and made her first trip to the country for a project with the Aga Khan Development Network in 2004. She also conducted research along the Turkey-Syria border in 2013 and 2014. Mukhopadhyay’s research has been funded by the Carnegie Corporation, the Eisenhower Institute, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the U.S. Institute of Peace, Harvard Law School, and the U.S. Department of Education. Her writings have been published in academic books and journals as well as by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Foreign Policy, U.S. News & World Report, and The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage Blog. She is a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations. Mukhopadhyay received her doctorate from Tufts University’s Fletcher School for Law and Diplomacy in 2010.