The speaker will describe his experiences over ten years of developing a comprehensive program to engage the formerly top secret Soviet biological weapons complex through joint scientific research and disease surveillance. He will also discuss how lessons learned can be applied to potential new efforts to reduce global threats of bioterrorism and potential pandemics.

Andrew Weber is the adviser for cooperative threat reduction policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. His responsibilities include developing and overseeing CTR biological threat reduction programs in the former Soviet Union, and nuclear and chemical weapons threat reduction projects in Central Asia. Before coming to the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 1996, Weber served as a U.S. Foreign Service officer in Saudi Arabia, Germany, Kazakhstan, and Hong Kong. Weber holds an MSFS degree from Georgetown University and a BA from Cornell University. He speaks Russian. Weber is an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Graduate School of Foreign Service.

Justin Hastings is a fifth-year PhD student in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in East and Southeast Asian politics, nuclear weapons policy, and nontraditional security issues. He has been a Boren Graduate Fellow, and a Public Policy and Nuclear Threats Fellow with UC's Institute on Global Cooperation and Conflict. In 2005 he was a visiting associate at the Institute for Defence and Strategic Studies in Singapore. During the course of his graduate studies he has worked in the Department of Defense on East Asian security issues, and at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on nonproliferation issues. He has an MA in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and an AB in public and international affairs from Princeton University.

Eric Heginbotham, a political scientist at the RAND Corporation, has joined the Pacific Council on International Policy, as a non-resident fellow focused on East Asian political and security issues. Among the projects he will carry out is a monograph on the triangular relationship among the United States, China and Japan. Heginbotham earlier served as a senior fellow of Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and has also been a visiting faculty member of Boston College's political science department. He speaks Japanese and Chinese and lived in Asia for more than 10 years. Heginbotham received a BA from Swarthmore College and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He recently completed a book manuscript on civil-military relations in East Asia, Crossed Swords: Divided Militaries and Politics in East Asia, and has published articles on Japanese and Chinese foreign policy in Foreign Affairs, International Security, and the National Interest, as well as chapters in several edited books.

Ron E. Hassner (speaker) is a graduate of Stanford University with degrees in political science and religious studies and a CISAC affiliate. His research revolves around symbolic and emotive aspects of international security with particular attention to religious violence, Middle Eastern politics and territorial disputes. His publications have focused on the role of perceptions in entrenching international disputes, the causes and characteristics of conflicts over sacred places, the characteristics of political-religious leadership and political-religious mobilization and the role of national symbols in conflict. Professor Hassner was a fellow of the MacArthur Consortium on Peace and Security in 2000-3. In 2003-4 he was a post-doctoral scholar at the Olin Institute for International Security, Harvard University.

Gail Lapidus (respondent) is a senior fellow emerita at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Lapidus is also professor emerita of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and served as chair of the Berkeley-Stanford Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies from 1985 to 1994. A specialist on Soviet society, politics and foreign policy, she has authored and edited a number of books on Soviet and post-Soviet affairs, including The New Russia: Troubled Transformation (Westview Press, 1995), From Union to Commonwealth: Nationalism and Separatism in the Soviet Republics, with Victor Zaslavsky and Philip Goldman (Cambridge University Press, 1992), The Soviet System in Crisis, with Alexander Dallin (Westview, 1992), and Women in Soviet Society (University of California Press, 1979). A graduate of Radcliffe College, she received her MA and PhD from Harvard University.

Tonya Putnam is currently a visiting scholar at CISAC and an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University. She received her PhD in political science from Stanford, and a JD from Harvard Law School. Putnam's research covers a range of issues in international relations and international law with a focus on mechanisms of rule making and enforcement.

Christopher Blattman is currently completing a PhD in economics at UC Berkeley and holds a master's degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of conflict and violence, the organization of guerrilla groups, as well as what post-conflict development policies work, for whom, and why. He recently completed a survey of war-affected men and boys in northern Uganda, and is presently conducting a similar survey of women and girls. Two randomized evaluations of post-conflict programs are planned in the same region for 2007, one studying the role of a group-based economic intervention in promoting community reintegration of ex-combatants, and another studying the introduction of a government and an independent press into communities not currently served by newspapers.

James Fearon is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, a professor of political science and CISAC affiliated faculty member at Stanford University. His research has focused on democracy and international disputes, explanations for interstate wars, and, most recently, the causes of civil and especially ethnic violence. He is presently working on a book manuscript (with David Laitin) on civil war since 1945. Representative publications include "Neotrusteeship and the Problem of Weak States" (International Security, Spring 2004), "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War" (APSR, February 2003), and "Rationalist Explanations for War" (International Organization, Summer 1995). Fearon won the 1999 Karl Deutsch Award, which is "presented annually to a scholar under the age of forty, or within ten years of the acquisition of his or her doctoral degree, who is judged to have made, through a body publications, the most significant contribution to the study of international relations and peace research." He was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences in 2002.

Dara Kay Cohen is a PhD candidate in political science at Stanford University and was a fellow and research assistant at CISAC in 2004-2005 and 2005-2006. Her research at CISAC involved studying the politics of national security; she examined the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, how security issues have affected congressional elections and co-wrote a paper with Jacob N. Shapiro on the failure of the homeland security alert system. Her current dissertation research focuses on the use of sexual violence during civil wars, and she spend last summer in Sierra Leone conducting initial field work. She previously worked at the Department of Justice as a paralegal in the Outstanding Scholars Program in the Counterterrorism Section and at the u.S. Embassy in London on terrorist financing issues. She received her a.B. in political science and philosophy with honors from Brown University in 2001.

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, with a PhD in political science from Stanford as well as a law degree from Yale, focuses his scholarship on how organizations cope with the legal responsibility for managing complex criminal justice, regulatory, and international security problems. He has published the leading academic paper on the operation of federal money laundering laws, and one of the most exhaustive empirical case studies of public participation in regulatory rulemaking proceedings. Recent projects address the role of criminal enforcement in managing transnational threats, the physical safety of refugee communities in the developing world, legislative and budgetary dynamics affecting the federal Department of Homeland Security, and the impact of bureaucratic structure on how institutions implement legal mandates. Professor Cuéllar is an affiliated faculty member at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation, and a member of the Executive committee for the Stanford International Initiative. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2001, he served as senior advisor to the u.S. Treasury Department's Undersecretary for Enforcement and clerked for Chief Judge Mary M. Schroeder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Bary R. Weingast is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution as well as the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University; he served as chair of that department from 1996 to 2001. He is also a professor of economics, by courtesy, at the university. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences from 1993 to 1994. Weingast is an expert in political economy and public policy, the political foundation of markets and economic reform, U.S. politics, and regulation. His current research focuses on the political determinants of public policymaking and the political foundations of markets and democracy. Weingast is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the 2006 recipient of the William H. Riker Prize in Political Science. He received the Heinz Eulau Award for Best paper from the American Political Science Review in 1987. With Charles Stewart, he received the Award for Best Paper n Political History b the American Political Science Association in 1994 and again in 1998. He is also the recipient, along with Kenneth Schultz, of the Franklin L. Burdette Award for Best paper Presented at the 1994 Political Science Association Meeting.

Paul Stockton is a senior research scholar at CISAC. He was formerly the associate provost at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and was the former director of its Center for Homeland Defense and Security. His teaching and research focus son how U.S. security institutions respond to changes in the threat (including the rise of terrorism), and the interaction of Congress and the Executive branch in restructuring national security budgets, policies and institutional arrangement.s Stockton joined the faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School in August 1990. From 1995 until 2000, he served as director of NPS's Center for Civil-Military Relations. From 2000-2001, he founded and served as the acting dean of NPS's School of International Graduate Studies. He was appointed associate provost in 2001.

Ambassador James E. Goodby is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a research affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has held several senior government positions dedicated to arms control and nonproliferation, including deputy to the special adviser to the president and secretary of state on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), 2000-2001; special representative of President Clinton for the security and dismantlement of nuclear weapons, 1995-1996; chief negotiator for nuclear threat reduction agreements, 1993-1994, and vice chair of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty talks, 1982-1983. He served as U.S. ambassador to Finland in 1980-1981.

Bart Bernstein is a Professor of American history at Stanford University. He has written very widely on post-World War II American history, including the surrender of Japan at the end of World War II, economic policy, diplomacy, nuclear history, and scientific discovery.

Matthew Kroenig is a doctoral candidate in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, the Herbert York Fellow at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California, and a predoctoral fellow at CISAC. His dissertation explains the strategic incentives that drive states to provide nuclear weapons technology to nonnuclear-weapon states. His other research focuses on international security, nuclear weapons proliferation, homeland security, terrorism, and civil war. His writings have appeared in such publications as Democratization, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Newsday, and Security Studies.

Kroenig has also served as a strategist in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he was a principal author of key national security strategy and defense review documents and where he led the development of a U.S. government-wide strategy for deterring terrorist networks. For his work, Kroenig received the Department of Defense's Award for Outstanding Achievement.