Nicole Suveges, a doctoral student in political science at the Johns Hopkins University, was killed on Tuesday in a bombing in the Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City. Ms. Suveges was serving as a civilian employee of the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System, a program that embeds social scientists within military units.

This is the second fatal attack suffered by the Human Terrain program in less than two months. On May 7 Michael V. Bhatia, a graduate student at the University of Oxford, was killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.

Six Iraqi civilians, two U.S. soldiers, and a U.S. State Department official also died in Tuesday’s attack, which took place at a district council office.

Ms. Suveges earned a master’s degree from George Washington University in 1998. In the late 1990s she served as an Army reservist in Bosnia. Her dissertation-in-progress was titled “Markets and Mullahs: Global Networks, Transnational Ideas, and the Deep Play of Political Culture.”

In Iraq she was assigned to the Army’s Third Brigade Combat Team. A statement released this afternoon by BAE Systems, the lead contractor of the Human Terrain program, said that her work there had “contributed materially to the success of the brigade in reducing the level of violence in the local community and in improving critical infrastructure.” —David Glenn