Mary Hope Schwoebel, Ph.D., brings 30 years of experience in the fields of peacebuilding, governance, humanitarian assistance, and development, and has worked for governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations. She served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay, where spent five years. She then spent six years in the Horn of Africa, managing programs for UNICEF, USAID, and NGOs in Somalia and Kenya. While raising a family and pursuing her doctorate, she spent 15 years consulting for USAID and State Department their partners, and other multi-lateral and non-governmental organizations.She has worked on every continent and in some of the world's most challenging environments, including Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Kenya, Peru, Pakistan, Colombia, Turkey, Nepal, and Indonesia, among others.

Just before accepting a faculty position at DCRS, she had spent five years at the Academy for International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding at the US Institute of Peace, where she developed and conducted training courses in over a dozen countries overseas and in Washington, D.C. and researched and authored policy-oriented publications. During her time in South Florida, Dr. Schwoebel has served as DCRS's Chair of the Curriculum Committee for all but one year since she has been at DCRS. During the 2018 election, she served as an Elections Monitor in various locations in Broward County. She is the Co-Chair of the Planning Committee of the Graduate Education in Conflict Resolution Symposium. She also serves on the Advisory Committee of the multitlaterally-funded multi-country research project "Forging a Resilient Social Contracts in Fragile and Conflict Contexts". She is the Director of Public Policy for the NSU chapter of the American Association of University Women.

Dr. Schwoebel is the author of a wide range of publications on international affairs, most recently “Legitimacy, Statebuilding and Peacebuilding in Somaliland: in Local Peacebuilding and Legitimacy, edited by Christopher Mitchell and Landon Hancock. Selected other book chapters include, "The Intersection of Public and Private Spheres for Pashtun Women in Politics" in Gender, Political Struggles and Gender Equality in South Asia and "The Evolution of Somali Women's Fashion During Changing Security Contexts" in The International Politics of Fashion: Being Fab in a Dangerous World. In 2017 she served as Visiting Editor for a special issue of the Journal of Peacebuilding and Development entitled, Peacebuilding Approaches to Preventing and Transforming Violent Extremism. Since she has been at NSU, she has overseen two multi-country studies in West and East Africa, one of gender and violent extremism and the other on transborder and regional issues in violent extremism, where she oversaw research teams comprised of international and national researchers in multiple languages.

Her areas of interest include peacebuilding and state building, peacebuilding and development, gender and conflict, culture and conflict, and the interactions between religious and indigenous systems of governance and conflict resolution and international interventions.