Lisa Stampnitzky (speaker) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a predoctoral fellow at CISAC. Her dissertation, "The Rise of the Terrorism Expert: The Development of Counterterrorism Expertise in the U.S., 1972-2005," concerns the organization of expert knowledge on terrorism from the 1970s to the present day. It examines how terrorism was first identified as a problem, the role of government in organizing the production of knowledge, and the ongoing efforts of academic and practical experts to define the field. She has also written on the historical construction of cultural capital and its role in elite university admissions. She received her BA in sociology from New College of Florida, and her MA in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.

John Meyer (respondent) is a professor of sociology (and by courtesy, education) emeritus, at Stanford; a faculty member at CDDRL; and a senior fellow, by courtesy, at FSI. He received his PhD from Columbia University, and taught there for several years before coming to Stanford. His research has focused on the spread of modern institutions around the world, and their impact on national states and societies. He is particularly interested in the spread and impact of scientific activity, and in the expansion and standardization of educational models. He has made many contributions to organizational theory (e.g., Organizational Environments, with W. R. Scott, Sage 1983), and to the sociology of education, developing lines of thought now called neoinstitutional theory. Since the late 1970s, he has worked on issues related to the impact of global society on national states and societies (e.g., Institutional Structure, co-authored with others, Sage 1987). Currently, he is completing a collaborative study of worldwide science and its impact on national societies (Drori, et al., Science in the Modern World Polity, Stanford, 2003), and is working on a study of the rise and impact of the worldwide human rights regime.

Lieutenant Colonel Joseph H. Felter (speaker), a career Special Forces and Foreign Area Officer, is the director of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point and an instructor in the U. S. Military Academy's terrorism studies program. His military experience includes service as a platoon leader with the 75th Ranger Regiment and as a Special Forces operational detachment-alpha and company commander in the 1st Special Forces Group. As a military attaché in Manila, he planned and coordinated combined efforts to develop the counter terrorist capabilities of the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Felter is a graduate of the United States Military Academy, earned a master's degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and received his PhD in political science from Stanford University. His dissertation assesses the impact that variation in quality and structures of state internal security forces has on efforts to combat insurgency and terrorism.

David Patel (respondent) is a 2006-2007 predoctoral fellow at both CDDRL (fall quarter) and CISAC (winter and spring quarters). He is completing a dissertation looking at questions of religious organization and collective action in the Middle East, with a theoretical focus on the relationship of organization and information in particular. Empirically, his study looks at Islamic institutions and their role in political action in a wide range of settings including 7th century garrison cities of the early Islamic empire, through the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Patel has spent a great deal of time in the Middle East over the last several years, including extended visits to Yemen, Morocco, Jordan, and Iraq, where he spent seven months in Basra conducting research beginning in the fall of 2003. He works with David Laitin, Jim Fearon, and Avner Greif at Stanford. In fall 2007 he will join the faculty at Cornell University as an assistant professor of political science.

Colin Kahl is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches courses in international relations, international security, American foreign policy, civil and ethnic conflict, and terrorism. He will be joining the faculty in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University in the fall of 2007. His current work focuses on U.S. military compliance with the Law of War in Iraq. His research on the topic has been published in Foreign Affairs ("How We Fight," November/December 2006) and International Security ("Rules of Engagement: Norms, Civilian Casualties, and U.S. Conduct in Iraq," forthcoming). His previous research analyzed the causes and consequences of violent civil and ethnic conflict in developing countries. His book on the subject, States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World, was published by Princeton University Press in March 2006, and related articles have appeared in International Security and the Journal of International Affairs. From January 2005 to August 2006, Kahl was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow conducting research on Law of War issues at the U.S. Department of Defense, where he worked in the office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Stability Operations. He has also been a consultant for the U.S. government's Political Instability Task Force (formerly the State Failure Task Force) since 1999. He received his BA in political science from the University of Michigan in 1993, and his PhD from Columbia University in 2000. In 1997-1998, he was a National Security Fellow at Harvard University's John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies.

David M. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University and winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for his book, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War. Reflecting his interdisciplinary training in American Studies, which combined the fields of history, literature, and economics, Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history. His 1970 book, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, embraced the medical, legal, political, and religious dimensions of the subject and helped to pioneer the emerging field of women's history. One of his later books, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980), used the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system, economy, and culture in the early twentieth century. He is a graduate of Stanford University (BA, history) and Yale University (MA, PhD, American studies).

Plutonium (Pu) and highly enriched uranium (HEU), the fissile material that is the sine qua non of nuclear weapons, manifest fingerprints that are unique to the manufacturing processes employed in their creation. Such fingerprints are not as clear as those made famous by the FBI for decades, or as DNA is today, but they are fingerprints, nonetheless. The technical challenge is to develop the processes that will link, beyond reasonable doubt, the fissile material to its manufacturer. If the technical challenges can be met, political challenges lay beyond and must be resolved before the civilized world can be assured that the fissile material that generates a nuclear explosion can be traced to its source, but if it can, many benefits to society will result. Among these are deterrence of potential suppliers, credible delay in reacting to nuclear terrorism, and international cooperation of the highest sort.

Harold Smith holds the appointment of distinguished visiting scholar and professor with the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), where he focuses on the impact of technology on foreign and defense policy. In 1993, Smith served as assistant to the scretary of defense for nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs during the Clinton administration. In 1960 he joined the faculty of UCB where he retired as professor and chairman of the Department of Applied Science in 1976. Smith was awarded a White House Fellowship in 1966 and was assigned as a special assistant to the secretary of defense. Since that time, he has served as an advisor to numerous governmental boards on national security policy. Of particular note are his chairmanship of the Vulnerability Task Force of the Defense Science Board and a special study for (then) Secretary of Defense Schlesinger on the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS); i.e. the Smith Report. He has published in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Wall Street Journal, U.S. News and World Report, and Arms Control Today. He received his PhD in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Bill Dunlop is currently a senior scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and has held numerous positions during his career there, including serving as the project manager for strategic missile and defensive weapons systems, the program manager for the development of the W87 warhead for the MX missile, and the program manager for earth penetrator weapons. From 1985 until 1990 he was the division leader overseeing work on thermonuclear weapons development. From January 1994 until December 1995, he served as the technical advisor to the U.S. ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament. The principal activity during this period in the Conference on Disarmament was the negotiation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. After his return from Geneva, Dunlop resumed the leadership of the Arms Control and Treaty Verification Program, which later was renamed the Proliferation Prevention and Arms Control (PPAC) Program. He continues to work part-time at LLNL where he is involved cargo security issues and defense activities. Dunlop received his BA in physics from the University of Pennsylvania. He received his MS in physics and his PhD in nuclear physics from the Univesity of California, Los Angeles.

Over five years since 9/11, the United States is still struggling to define the nature of the terrorist challenge it faces let alone fully comprehend it. As a consequence, the United States and its partners in the "global war on terror" still lack a comprehensive strategy for responding to the challenge. Drawing on a growing area of social science research relating to "social contagion" phenomena, the challenge posed by "Islamist militancy" will be assessed using the principles and practices of epidemiology. A new more promising strategy emerges as a consequence.

Paul B. Stares is vice president of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) and director of its Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention. He currently focuses on northeast Asian security issues, U.S. post-conflict stability operations, and counterterrorism policy. He has authored or edited nine books in addition to numerous book chapters, articles, and op-eds in leading U.S. and European newspapers. In 2006, Stares led the Iraq Study Groups Strategic Environment Expert Working Group.

Prior to joining USIP in 2002, Stares was associate director and senior research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. From 1996 to 2000 he worked in Japan, first as a senior research fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs and then as director of studies at the Japan Center for International Exchange. At various times, Stares has been a senior fellow and research associate in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution as well as a NATO fellow, a scholar-in-residence at the MacArthur Foundation Moscow Office, a Rockefeller International Relations Fellow, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.

He has also held academic posts at the University of Sussex and the University of Lancaster in Great Britain, where he received his PhD.