Dr Sumaiya Shaikh is an Australian Neuroscientist with a PhD in Medicine (Neurophysiology) from Sydney and currently holds a post-doctoral fellowship in Sweden. She has also conducted teaching for year 1-2 MBBS at Western Sydney University for over 5 years.

She has developed a laboratory paradigm to access and differentiate between the propensity to engage in retaliatory vs. appetitive aggression (a quantifiable violent behaviour), the latter closely mimicking violent extremism.

She has conducted several interviews with people who have engaged in ideological (e.g. violent extremism) and non-ideological acts of violence to study the ‘bio-psycho-social’ basis of appetitive violence- a rewarding-motivational violent behaviour, most commonly observed in terrorists.