Donald Grady is currently the chief of police and director of public safety for Northern Illinois University. He holds a PH.D. in Administration and Management from Walden University in Minneapolis.

Grady has worked extensively in Eastern Europe, introducing democratic style policing in cultures where it was previously unknown. During the late 1990s, he worked in the Balkans helping to establish police forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Leading a United Nations force of more than 315 police officers drawn from 36 countries, he trained and installed a professional police force staffed by officers willing to protect all citizens regardless of ethnicity or religion.

Grady served as senior police adviser to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, where he authored the strategic plan for the establishment of the Kosovo Police Service School. Subsequently, he was named deputy police commissioner in Kosovo, where he developed and implemented the post-war re-entry plan for the United Nations International Civilian Police Mission.

Grady has spent eight years at NIU building and training a police force that adheres to the tenets of “integrated policing.” According to Grady, integrated policing is not just a philosophy or an open-ended problem-solving strategy, but rather a prescription for the reduction and avoidance of crime.