Professor Stephen Sloan was a professor for 38 years at the University of Oklahoma, and lived only 10 blocks from the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building when it was bombed on April 19, 1995. He was a member of the steering committee that established the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, a nonprofit group that was incorporated in 1999 to provide the families of the Oklahoma City bombing victims a "living memorial."

Since the 1970s, he has developed simulations of terrorist attacks to help the U.S. Army and Air Force and other government agencies and businesses prepare for those scenarios. He conducted workshops for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey before the World Trade Center was first bombed in 1993 and was an expert contributor to the Vice President's Task Force on Combating Terrorism in 1986.

Sloan has also taught classes, made workshop presentations and developed terrorism simulations for nearly 40 years. He has worked as a consultant with U.S. and foreign governments and with state and local law enforcement agencies.

Sloan received his M.A. in 1962 and his Ph.D in 1967, both from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. He majored in Comparative Politics, and his dissertation on the examination of Lucian W. Pye's Theory of Political Development won the Founder's Day Award in 1966.