Olga Smirnova is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Eastern Carolina University. She received her Ph. D. from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and conducts research on the role of public policy in urban and regional economic development, state and local government, and the interaction of land use and transportation policy. She is also skilled in social network analysis and has applied this analysis technique to various on-line data sources to understand the social world of computer hackers and malware writers.