Robert A. Pape is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago specializing in international security affairs. His publications include Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, June 2005); Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Cornell, 1996), "Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work," in International Security (1997), "The Determinants of International Moral Action," in International Organization (1999), "The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," in American Political Science Review (August 2003), "The True Worth of Air Power," in Foreign Affairs (March/April 2004), and "Soft Balancing against the United States," in International Security (Summer 2005).

His commentary on international security policy has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, The New Republic, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He has appeared on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer; Nightline; ABC News; CNN's Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper and Lou Dobbs; Fox's John Gipson; CNN International; and National Public Radio.

Before coming to Chicago in 1999, he taught international relations at Dartmouth College for five years and air power strategy for the U.S. Air Force's School of Advanced Airpower Studies for three years. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1988 and graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pittsburgh in 1982. His current work focuses on the origins of suicide terrorism and the logic of soft balancing in a unipolar world.

Sigfried Hecker is a visiting professor at CISAC and an emeritus director of Los Alamos National Laboratory. A metallurgist, he focuses on plutonium science and nuclear weapons stockpile stewardship, while working closely with the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy on a variety of cooperative threat reduction programs. He is actively involved with the U.S. National Academies, serving on the Council of the National Academy of Engineering, as chair of the newly established Committee on Counterterrorism Challenges for Russia and the United States, and as a member of the National Academies Committee on Nuclear Nonproliferation. At CISAC, he also contributes regularly to seminars and to the popular undergraduate course, Technology and National Security, taught by William Perry and Elisabeth Paté-Cornell.

Directing Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1986 through 1997, Hecker was named Laboratory Director of the Year by the National Laboratory Consortium in 1998. He has devoted most of his career to providing technical and leadership expertise to the laboratory, beginning with summer graduate school and postdoctoral assignments there. After a three-year stint as a senior research metallurgist with the General Motors Research Laboratories, he returned to Los Alamos in 1973 as a technical staff member in the laboratory's Physical Metallurgy Group. Later he led the Science and Technology Division and chaired the Center for Materials Science before becoming director.

Among his professional distinctions, Hecker is a member of the National Academy of Engineering; a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences; a fellow of the TMS, or Minerals, Metallurgy and Materials Society; a fellow of the American Society for Metals; an honorary member of the American Ceramics Society; and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His achievements have been recognized with the American Nuclear Society's Seaborg Medal and many other awards, including the Alumni Association Gold Medal and the Undergraduate Distinguished Alumni Award from Case Western Reserve University, where he earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in metallurgy.

This presentation is based on a paper written by Anne Platt Barrows, Paul Kucik, William Skimmyhorn and John Straigis.

Paul Kucik is a Major in the U.S. Army. He served in Aviation units in a series of assignments, including Company Command. He then served as Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the United States Military Academy. He later served as analyst and as deputy director of the U.S. Army Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics from the United States Military Academy and a Master of Business Administration from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Anne Platt Barrows is a Member of the Technical Staff in the Advanced System Deployments department at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California. She focuses on facility protection, primarily on defending facilities against attacks with chemical agents. She holds a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and a B.A. in Ethics, Politics, and Economics from Yale University.

William Skimmyhorn is a Captain in the U.S. Army. He has served in Aviation units in a variety of assignments including Bosnia, Kosovo and two tours in Korea. His jobs have ranged from Platoon Leader to Liaison Officer to Troop Commander. He is currently a dual Master's Student at Stanford University studying International Policy and Management Science and Engineering. He has a Bachelor of Science Degree in Economics from the United States Military Academy.

John Straigis is currently working as a Systems Engineer at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company in Sunnyvale, California. He just celebrated his second anniversary with the company, and is presently in Special Programs. Concurrently, he is completing his second Master's degree from Stanford University, in Management Science and Engineering, with a focus on Decision and Risk Analysis. His first Master's, before beginning his career at Lockheed Martin, was in Aero/Astro Engineering, also from Stanford. For undergraduate, he attended Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, in Terre Haute, Indiana, receiving double degrees in Chemical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. Outside of work and school, he enjoys several sports, particularly ice hockey, in which he is the starting goaltender for the Stanford ice hockey team.