In Washington's elite circles of CIA spooks and Home Land Security counter-terrorism experts, Dr Anne Speckhard is a sort of "terrorist whisperer". The Georgetown University academic and former family therapist, has done what few of her fellow American counselling colleagues have dared to do: go into the homes of families which were once home to suicide bombers to find out what it is that makes a terrorist tick. She's spent the better part of a decade travelling the world's trouble spots; from the West Bank and Gaza, to Chechenya and Iraq, talking to mothers of martyrs to understand their dead children's motivations. She's slept in the beds of suicide bombers, played cards with jihadists, and spent nights intimately talking to terrorists as they describe the euphoria of putting on a "bomber belt" and dying for a cause. The result is her 2012 book, Talking to Terrorists, Understanding the Psycho-Social Motivations of Militant Jihadi Terrorists, Mass Hostage Takers, Suicide Bombers & Martyrs.

"People opened up to us as they often saw me as a mother figure when I went with my students, though it was often terrifying to people who were so willing to cold heartedly kill other people for a cause; it was sometimes like listening doctors who cut off a side of themselves to deal with the daily trauma of their work," she said.

The book is now considered a seminal text for understanding the minds of people on the trajectory toward terrorism, and used as compulsory reading at Israel's Lauder School of Government, and the US's Intelligence Analysis Graduate Program at the prestigious John Hopkins University.

On Thursday she gave the keynote address at the Security 2013 Exhibition at Darling Harbour on "The shift from home-grown radicalisation to violent extremism." She also met with NSW police to talk about the Lebanese diaspora, and reports of around 200 young Australian radicals going to Syria.