Dr. Shmuel Bar is Director of Studies at the Institute of Policy and Strategy in Herzliya, Israel and on the steering team of the annual "Herzliya Conference". He is also an adjunct Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and has been (2007) Distinguished Koret Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He has lectured at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya on issues relating to Israeli national security.

Dr. Bar served for thirty years in the Israeli government, first in the IDF Intelligence and then in the analytic and operational positions in the Israeli Office of the Prime Minister. Since the mid 1980’s he specialized in the ideology and operational codes of Islamic fundamentalist movements and particularly of the Jihadi movement that later evolved into al-Qaeda. Between 1998-2002 Dr. Bar served as First Secretary at the Israeli Embassy in The Hague, Netherlands and in that capacity liaised with government agencies in the UK

Since 2002, Dr. Bar has headed research projects – some of them for US government agencies - and published extensively on issues relating to the Middle East, including deterrence theory in the context of the Middle East, radical Islamic ideology, Iranian defense doctrine, leadership and negotiation behavior, Syrian leadership and the Ba’ath party, Jordan and the Palestinians. He holds a Ph.D. in History of the Middle East from Tel-Aviv University.