Dr. Erica Koegler has been on the Steering Committee of HTCN since 2018. In 2016, Dr. Koegler began collaborating with a St. Louis based agency that had received federal funding to combat human trafficking for over a decade. The collaboration sought to disseminate data around human trafficking, information which had previously been scant. From there, Dr. Koegler conducted in-depth interviews with a number of human trafficking service providers in the St. Louis region to further contextualize some of the information that was identified through the agency’s data. Simultaneously, Dr. Koegler worked with two researchers from the University of Missouri to collect survey data from sex trafficking service providers across the state of Missouri to identify service gaps and training needs. Most recently, Dr. Koegler is the principal investigator on a federally-funded study to collect data on the nature and scope of human trafficking in Cape Town, South Africa – a project with several participating institutions including University of the Western Cape, Washington University School of Medicine and University of Missouri at Columbia. Dr. Koegler also has been awarded institutional funds to collect in-depth interviews with human trafficking service providers in Cape Town for the summer of 2021. Dr. Koegler is an Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri St. Louis.
Her work is featured in an UMSL Daily article found here.