Residing on the side of an active volcano in the jungles of Hawai’i with her wife and a menagerie of animals, Dr. Amanda Sauceda-Skuldt is a nerdy queer punk who loves to explore everything from quantum physics and neuroscience to rotting wood and raccoon tracks. Born to a Mormon family and raised in Utah, she spent time as a teenager at the Challenger Foundation wilderness survival school, recently the subject of a Netflix documentary Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare. 

Amanda has written for the Washington Post and is author of the entry on Terrorism and Foreign Policy in the Wiley-Blackwell The International Studies Encyclopedia. Her doctoral dissertation, “State Sponsored Terrorism? Leadership Survival and the Foreign Policy of Fear", was featured in "Selected Dissertations and Theses on Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence, 1980-2013", in the journal Perspectives on Terrorism. This scholarly work underpins her deep understanding of political conflict and state manipulation, elements that are regular themes of her work.

Her academic and professional expertise is complemented by her hands-on experiences as a young adult in the rugged landscapes of southeastern Alaska, where she lived with a band of fisher folk and forest punks in a self-built, self-managed community in the forest and worked in the commercial fishing industry.

Later, in Austin, Texas, Amanda founded and ran Austin Trigger Warning, a queer/trans gun club focused on self and community protection. 

When not writing, Amanda is a cybersecurity Compliance Engineer who holds a PhD in Government from the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in political violence and terrorism.