Stanford University

Peaceful applications of plutonium for space exploration

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Abstract: The short half-life (87.7 yr) of the isotope plutonium-238 makes it ideal for use in radioisotope power systems – nuclear power systems that derive their energy from the heat produced by spontaneous radioactive decay, as distinguished from nuclear fission. 238Pu has become an important source of power for fuelling NASA unmanned interplanetary spacecraft, and instruments on Mars.  The use of plutonium in space exploration poses interesting policy questions that balance safety against scientific understanding of the solar system. I will provide an overview of the production, safety, component fabrication, and peaceful applications of this very important plutonium isotope.  

About the Speaker: David L. Clark is a Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow and Director of the Laboratory’s National Security Education Center (NSEC). He joined Los Alamos as a postdoctoral fellow in 1988. Since then he has held various leadership positions at the Laboratory, and become an international authority on the chemistry and physics of the actinides. He has published 170 peer-reviewed publications, encyclopedia and book chapters, and is currently co-editing the 2nd edition of the Plutonium Handbook. He is a CISAC affiliate whose research interests are in the molecular and electronic structure of actinide materials, applications of synchrotron radiation to nuclear security, behavior of actinide and fission products in the environment, the aging effects of nuclear weapons materials, and education and training in actinide science.  

David L. Clark

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David L. Clark is a retired Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Fellow and Guest Scientist with the Laboratory’s Glenn T. Seaborg Institute for Actinide Science.  He was LANL’s Director of the National Security Education Center from 2013-2025.

His research interests are in the molecular and electronic structure of actinide materials, applications of synchrotron radiation to nuclear security, behavior of actinide and fission products in the environment, the aging effects in nuclear weapons materials, and the education of judges on the methods of science.  He is an international authority on the chemistry and physics of the actinides, and has published nearly 200 peer-reviewed publications, encyclopedia and book chapters. He is the co-Editor of the six volume Plutonium Handbook, portions of which were written while a CISAC Visiting Scholar in 2015.

Clark served as inaugural Director of the Los Alamos Glenn T. Seaborg Institute for Transactinium Science between 1997-2009. He has served the DOE as a technical advisor for environmental stewardship including the Rocky Flats cleanup and closure (1995-2005), closure of High-Level Waste tanks at the Savannah River Site (2011), and as a technical advisor to the DOE High Level Waste Corporate Board (2009-2011). He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Los Alamos Laboratory Fellow.  He is the recipient of two ACS national awards - the Nobel Laureate Signature Award (1988) and the Glenn Seaborg Award in Nuclear Chemistry (2017). He has also been honored with several Defense Programs Awards of Excellence.

He received a B.S. in chemistry in 1982 from the University of Washington, and a Ph.D. in 1986 from Indiana University. Clark was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford before joining Los Alamos National Laboratory as a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow in 1988. 

Laboratory Fellow Director, National Security Education Center Los Alamos National Laboratory
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Seminars

A Conversation with General Michael Hayden

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About the Event: In conversation with Philip Taubman, General Hayden will discuss intelligence and cybersecurity challenges the United States faces in combatting terrorism, dealing with North Korea, Iran and Russia, and will assess President Trump’s relations with the U.S. intelligence community. 

About the Speaker: General Michael Hayden is a retired four-star general who served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency when the course of world events was changing at a rapid rate. As head of the country’s premier intelligence agencies, he was on the frontline of global change, the war on terrorism and the growing cyber challenge. He understands the dangers, risks, and potential rewards of the political, economic, and security situations facing us. General Hayden dissects political situations in hot spots around the world, analyzing the tumultuous global environment and what it all means for Americans and America’s interests. He speaks on the delicate balance between liberty and security in intelligence work, as well the potential benefits and dangers associated with the cyber domain. As the former head of two multi-billion dollar enterprises, he can also address the challenges of managing complex organizations in times of stress and risk, and the need to develop effective internal and external communications.

In addition to leading CIA and NSA, General Hayden was the country’s first principal deputy director of national intelligence and the highest-ranking military intelligence officer in the country.  In all of these jobs, he worked to put a human face on American intelligence, explaining to the American people the role of espionage in protecting both American security and American liberty.  Hayden also served as commander of the Air Intelligence Agency and Director of the Joint Command and Control Warfare Center and served in senior staff positions at the Pentagon, at U.S. European Command, at the National Security Council, and the U.S. Embassy in Bulgaria. He was also the deputy chief of staff for the United Nations Command and U.S. Forces in South Korea.

Hayden has been a frequent expert and commentator on major news outlets and in top publications, valued for his expertise on intelligence matters like cyber security, government surveillance, geopolitics, and more. He was featured in the HBO documentary Manhunt, which looked at espionage through the eyes of the insiders who led the secret war against Osama bin Laden, and in Showtime’s The Spymasters, a detailed look at the directors of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Hayden is currently a principal at the Chertoff Group and a distinguished visiting professor at the George Mason University Schar School of Policy and Government. He is on the board of directors of Motorola Solutions and serves on a variety of other boards and consultancies. In 2013, the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) awarded Hayden the 29th annual William Oliver Baker Award.  General Hayden is also the first recipient of the Helms Award presented by the CIA Officers’ Memorial Foundation.  In 2014 he was the inaugural Humanitas visiting professor in intelligence studies at Oxford University in the United Kingdom.  His recent memoir, Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror, has been a New York Times best-seller and was recently selected as one of the 100 most notable books of 2016.

Philip Taubman is Adjunct Professor at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. He is also the former Moscow and Washington Bureau Chief, and Deputy Editorial Page Editor, of The New York Times. Philip Taubman served as a reporter and editor at The New York Times for thirty years, specializing in national security coverage. He is author of Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America’s Space Espionage, and The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb. He is working on a biography of George P. Shultz, the former secretary of state.

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Michael Hayden Former director, CIA, NSA
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Directors' Seminar Series

How low-carbon technologies will improve our climate, health, and national security and stabilize the world's economies

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Abstract: In 2015 nations agreed to the Sustainable Development Goals, including ending poverty, protecting the planet, and ensuring prosperity for all. To accomplish them, we need to find synergies across the seventeen goals. Fortunately, some co-benefits are clear.  Cutting greenhouse gas emissions does much more than fight climate change.  It saves water and improves water quality. It saves lives, too, as witnessed by the ~20,000 or more people who die from coal pollution each year in the United States, with a million more people worldwide. The low-carbon economy will help stabilize national security, create net jobs, and more.

About the Speaker: Rob Jackson is Douglas Provostial Professor and Chair of the Earth System Science Department at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow in Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment and Precourt Institute for Energy (jacksonlab.stanford.edu).  As an environmental scientist, he chairs the Global Carbon Project (globalcarbonproject.org), an international organization that tracks natural and anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.  His photographs have appeared in many media outlets, including the NY Times, Washington Post, and USA Today, and he has published several books of poetry. Jackson is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Ecological Society of America and was honored at the White House with a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering.

Rob Jackson Douglas Provostial Professor and Chair Earth System Science Department, Stanford University
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The Cold War: A World History

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Abstract: The Cold War was about the rise and the solidification of US power. But it was also about more than that. It was about the defeat of Soviet-style Communism and the victory, in Europe, of a form of democratic consensus that had become institutionalized through the European Union. In China it meant a political and social revolution carried out by the Chinese Communist Party. In Latin America it meant the increasing polarization of societies along Cold War ideological lines of division. This book attempts to show the significance of the Cold War between capitalism and socialism on a world scale, in all its varieties and its sometimes confusing inconsistencies. As a one-volume history it can do little but scratch the surface of  complicated developments. But it will have served its purpose if it invites the reader to explore further the ways in which the Cold War made the world what it is today.

About the Speaker: Odd Arne Westad is the S.T. Lee Professor of U.S.-Asia Relations at Harvard University, where he teaches at the Kennedy School of Government. He is an expert on contemporary international history and on the eastern Asian region.  

Before coming to Harvard in 2015, Westad was School Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). While at LSE, he directed LSE IDEAS, a leading centre for international affairs, diplomacy and strategy.
 
Professor Westad won the Bancroft Prize for The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. The book, which has been translated into fifteen languages, also won a number of other awards. Westad served as general editor for the three-volume Cambridge History of the Cold War, and is the author of the Penguin History of the World (now in its 6th edition). His most recent book, Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750, won the Asia Society’s book award for 2013.
Arne Westad Harvard University
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Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?

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This event is a joint sponsorship between The Center for International Security and Cooperation and The Hoover Institution

About the Event: In this event, Professor Graham Allison will be interviewed by Niall Ferguson, Professor of History at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, about his new book, Thucydides’ Trap. In this book Allison argues that China and the United States are heading toward a war neither wants. Behind this dynamic is what Allison sees as a deadly pattern of structural stress that results when a rising power challenges a hegemon. This phenomenon is as old as history itself. About the Peloponnesian War that devastated ancient Greece, the historian Thucydides explained: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” Over the past 500 years, these conditions have occurred sixteen times. War broke out in twelve of them. Today, as an unstoppable China approaches an immovable America and both Xi Jinping and Donald Trump promise to make their countries ‘great again,’ the seventeenth case looks grim. Unless China is willing to scale back its ambitions or Washington can accept becoming number two in the Pacific, a trade conflict, cyberattack, or accident at sea could soon escalate into all-out war (excerpt from www.amazon.com). Audience members will have an opportunity to ask questions after the conversation.

About the Speaker: Director of Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Graham Allison is a leading analyst of U.S. national security and defense policy with a special interest in nuclear weapons, terrorism, and decision-making. As Assistant Secretary of Defense in the first Clinton Administration, Dr. Allison received the Defense Department's highest civilian award, the Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, for "reshaping relations with Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to reduce the former Soviet nuclear arsenal." This resulted in the safe return of more than 12,000 tactical nuclear weapons from the former Soviet republics and the complete elimination of more than 4,000 strategic nuclear warheads previously targeted at the United States and left in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus when the Soviet Union disappeared.

His latest book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in May 2017.  His 2013 book, Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States and the World (co-authored with Robert Blackwill), has been a bestseller in the U.S. and abroad. Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, now in its third printing, was selected by the New York Times as one of the "100 most notable books of 2004."  It presents a strategy for preventing nuclear terrorism organized under a doctrine of "Three Nos:" no loose nukes; no new nascent nukes; and no new nuclear weapons states. Dr. Allison's first book, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (1971), was released in an updated and revised second edition (1999) and ranks among the all-time bestsellers with more than 450,000 copies in print.

Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford, and a senior fellow of the Center for European Studies, Harvard. He is also a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation Distinguished Scholar at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. He has written fourteen books, including The House of Rothschild, Empire, The War of the World, The Ascent of Money, The Great Degeneration, and Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist. His 2011 feature-length film Kissinger won the New York International Film Festival’s prize for best documentary. His PBS series The Ascent of Money won the International Emmy for best documentary. His many prizes and awards include the Benjamin Franklin Prize for Public Service (2010), the Hayek Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2012) and the Ludwig Erhard Prize for Economic Journalism (2013). He writes a weekly column for the London Sunday Times and the Boston Globe.

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Graham Allison Professor of Government Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
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The continuation of policy by other means: asymmetric warfare via the ballot box

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About the event: In his talk Toomas Hendrik Ilves will discuss how various digital tools have been used in democracies in Europe and the US in an attempt to disrupt and affect elections outcomes. These are new approaches, meant if not to alter electoral outcomes then at least to sow discord and seem in some instances to have been successful. Methods used include hacking into political parties' servers and “doxxing” embarrassing hacked materials; disseminating via “bots” false stories that have occasionally gone viral; as well highly granular big data analyses to target voters with ads specifically tailored to their profiles as culled from social media.

These methods and tactics have been employed in the U.S, French, and Dutch elections; cyber-break-ins into the Bundestag and German political think tanks suggest they will play a role in the upcoming German parliamentary elections. Perpetrated by an authoritarian government, they are asymmetric: without a free media environment they are immune to such tacts even if democracies were to even try to respond in kind. What democracies have experienced in the past several years will force them to adapt to a new environment with the realization that there are many ways for an adversary to change a nations policies.

About the Speaker: Toomas Hendrik Ilves was born on December 26, 1953, to an Estonian family living in Stockholm, Sweden. He was educated in the United States, receiving a degree from Columbia University in 1976 and a master's degree in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978.

In 1984 he moved to Munich, Germany, to work at the office of Radio Free Europe, first as a researcher and foreign policy analyst and later as the head of the Estonian Desk.

From 1993 to 1996 Ilves served in Washington as the ambassador of the Republic of Estonia to the United States and Canada. During this time, he launched the Tiger Leap Initiative to computerize and connect all Estonian schools online with Education Minister Jaak Aaviksoo. He then served as minister of foreign affairs from 1996 to 1998. After a brief period as chairman of the North Atlantic Institute in 1998, he was again appointed minister of foreign affairs, serving until 2002.

From 2002 to 2004, Ilves was a member of the Estonian Parliament and in 2004 he was elected a member of the European Parliament, where he was vice-president of the Foreign Affairs Committee. As a MEP, he initiated the Baltic Sea Strategy that was later implemented as official regional policy of the European Union.

Ilves was elected president of the Republic of Estonia in 2006. He was re-elected for a second term in office in 2011.

During his presidency, Ilves has been appointed to serve in several high positions in the field of ICT in the European Union. He served as chairman of the EU Task Force on eHealth from 2011 to 2012 and was chairman of the European Cloud Partnership Steering Board at the invitation of the European Commission from 2012 to 2014. In 2013 he chaired the High-Level Panel on Global Internet Cooperation and Governance Mechanisms convened by ICANN. From 2014 to 2015 Ilves was the co-chair of the advisory panel of the World Bank's World Development Report 2016 "Digital Dividends" and was also the chair of World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Cyber Security beginning in June 2014.

Starting from 2016, Ilves co-chairs The World Economic Forum working group The Global Futures Council on Blockchain Technology. In 2017 he joined Stanford University as a Bernard and Susan Liautaud Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

President Ilves has published many essays and articles in Estonian and English on numerous topics ranging from Estonian language, history, and literature to global foreign and security policy and cyber security. His books include essay collections in Estonian, Finnish, Latvian, Hungarian, and Russian.

His international awards and honorary degrees include Knight of Freedom Award by the Casimir Pulaski Foundation (2016), the Aspen Prague Award by the Aspen Institute (2015), the Freedom Award by the Atlantic Council (2014) and the NDI Democracy Award by the National Democratic Institute (2013). His Honorary Degrees include an Honorary Degree from St. Olaf College, US (2014), an Honorary Degree from the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland (2010), and an Honorary Degree from Tbilisi University, Georgia (2007).

Encina Hall, 2nd floor

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A Worst Practices Guide to Preventing Insider Threats

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Abstract: High-security organizations around the world face devastating threats from insiders—trusted employees with access to sensitive information, facilities, and materials. From Edward Snowden to the Fort Hood shooter to the theft of nuclear materials, the threat from insiders is on the front page and at the top of the policy agenda. Insider Threats offers detailed case studies of insider disasters across a range of different types of institutions, from biological research laboratories, to nuclear power plants, to the U.S. Army. Matthew Bunn and Scott D. Sagan outline cognitive and organizational biases that lead organizations to downplay the insider threat, and they synthesize "worst practices" from these past mistakes, offering lessons that will be valuable for any organization with high security and a lot to lose.

About the Speakers: Matthew Bunn is a Professor of Practice at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. His research interests include nuclear theft and terrorism; nuclear proliferation and measures to control it; the future of nuclear energy and its fuel cycle; and policies to promote innovation in energy technologies. Before joining the Kennedy School in January 1997, he served for three years as an adviser to the Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he played a major role in U.S. policies related to the control and disposition of weapons-usable nuclear materials in the United States and the former Soviet Union, and directed a secret study for President Clinton on security for nuclear materials in Russia.

Scott S. Sagan is the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, the Mimi and Peter Haas University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. He also serves as Project Chair for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Initiative on New Dilemmas in Ethics, Technology, and War. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University. From 1984 to 1985, he served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. Sagan has also served as a consultant to the office of the Secretary of Defense and at the Sandia National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. 

Amy Zegart is is co-director of CISAC and Professor of Political Science, by courtesy. She is also the Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. 

Before coming to Stanford in 2011, Zegart served as professor of public policy at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs and as a fellow at the Burkle Center for International Relations. Her research examines the organization of American national security agencies and their effectiveness. She is the author of two award-winning books. Flawed by Design, which chronicles the development of the Central Intelligence Agency, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and National Security Council, won the highest national dissertation award in political science. Spying Blind, which examines why American intelligence agencies failed to adapt to the terrorist threat before 9/11, won the National Academy of Public Administration’s Brownlow Book Award. She has also published in International Security, Political Science Quarterly, and other leading academic journals. She serves on the editorial boards of Terrorism and Political Violence and Intelligence and National Security. Her most recent book is Eyes on Spies: Congress and the United States Intelligence Community.
 
Zegart was featured by the National Journal as one of the ten most influential experts in intelligence reform. 

- The book, Insider Threats, will be available for purchase at the event -

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Scott D. Sagan

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E202
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 725-2715 (650) 723-0089
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The Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science
The Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education  
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
rsd25_073_1160a_1.jpg PhD

Scott D. Sagan is the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, the Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, where he previously served as the social science co-director. He is the Inaugural Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellow for Nuclear Ethics and Security at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs (2026-2027). Sagan also serves as co-chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on International Security Studies. Before joining the Stanford faculty, he was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon.

Sagan is the author of Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton University Press, 1989); The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton University Press, 1993); and, with co-author Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate (W.W. Norton, 2012). He is the co-editor of Insider Threats (Cornell University Press, 2017) with Matthew Bunn; and co-editor of The Fragile Balance of Terror (Cornell University Press, 2022) with Vipin Narang. Sagan was also the guest editor of a two-volume special issue of Daedalus: Ethics, Technology, and War (Fall 2016) and The Changing Rules of War (Winter 2017).

Recent publications include “Creeds and Contestation: How US Nuclear and Legal Doctrine Influence Each Other,” with Janina Dill, in a special issue of Security Studies (December 2025); “Kettles of Hawks: Public Opinion on the Nuclear Taboo and Noncombatant Immunity in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Israel”, with Janina Dill and Benjamin A. Valentino in Security Studies (February 2022); “The Rule of Law and the Role of Strategy in U.S. Nuclear Doctrine” with Allen S. Weiner in International Security (Spring 2021); “Does the Noncombatant Immunity Norm Have Stopping Power?” with Benjamin A. Valentino in International Security (Fall 2020); and “Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants” and “On Reciprocity, Revenge, and Replication: A Rejoinder to Walzer, McMahan, and Keohane” with Benjamin A. Valentino in Ethics & International Affairs (Winter 2019).

In 2022, Sagan was awarded Thérèse Delpech Memorial Award from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at their International Nuclear Policy Conference. In 2017, he received the International Studies Association’s Susan Strange Award which recognizes the scholar whose “singular intellect, assertiveness, and insight most challenge conventional wisdom and intellectual and organizational complacency" in the international studies community. Sagan was also the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences William and Katherine Estes Award in 2015, for his work addressing the risks of nuclear weapons and the causes of nuclear proliferation. The award, which is granted triennially, recognizes “research in any field of cognitive or behavioral science that advances understanding of issues relating to the risk of nuclear war.” In 2013, Sagan received the International Studies Association's International Security Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award. He has also won four teaching awards: Stanford’s 1998-99 Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching; Stanford's 1996 Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching; the International Studies Association’s 2008 Innovative Teaching Award; and the Monterey Institute for International Studies’ Nonproliferation Education Award in 2009.     

Former co-director, Center for International Security and Cooperation
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Matthew Bunn Professor of Practice; Co-Principal Investigator, Project on Managing the Atom Belfer Center, Harvard Kennedy School

Amy Zegart

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E216
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 725-9754 (650) 723-0089
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
amy zegart headshot.png PhD

Dr. Amy Zegart is the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. The author of five books, she specializes in U.S. intelligence, emerging technologies, and national security. At Hoover, she leads the Technology Policy Accelerator and the Oster National Security Affairs Fellows Program. She also is an associate director and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI; a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute; and professor of political science by courtesy, teaching 100 students each year about how emerging technologies are transforming espionage.

Her award-winning research includes the leading academic study of intelligence failures before 9/11: Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 (Princeton, 2007) and the bestseller Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence (Princeton, 2022), which was nominated by Princeton University Press for the Pulitzer Prize. She also coauthored Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity, with Condoleezza Rice (Twelve, 2018). Her op-eds and essays have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Politico, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.

Zegart has advised senior officials about intelligence and foreign policy for more than two decades. She served on the National Security Council staff and as a presidential campaign foreign policy advisor and has testified before numerous congressional committees. Before her academic career, she spent several years as a McKinsey & Company consultant.

Zegart received an AB in East Asian studies from Harvard and an MA and a PhD in political science from Stanford. She serves on the boards of the Council on Foreign Relations, Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, and the American Funds/Capital Group.

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Directors' Seminar Series

Spent Nuclear Fuel in South Korea and China

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Abstract: Relative to the struggles Western nuclear powered countries have experienced in the recent past, South Korea and China have had notable success building up nuclear power at an impressive scale. China today leads the world in new builds of nuclear reactors. Moving beyond indigenous construction, South Korea is on the verge of completing its first exported power reactor in the UAE, marking an impressive accomplishment for this relatively new nuclear startup. However, China and South Korea now face a challenge other more established nuclear powered countries have yet to solve, an unresolved structure of the back end of the fuel cycle. Despite the uncertainty that exists about the ultimate fate of the spent fuel, the more immediate problem of interim storage is urgent. In this talk, I will review the status and urgency of this problem in the two countries with quantitative results from modeling accumulation, storage and transportation. I will then outline immediate policy mitigations needed in the short term as well as strategies for designing a more permanent solution.

About the Speaker: Rob Forrest is currently a member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories where his research interests include nuclear power, cybersecurity, and nonproliferation. As a member of the systems research group, he specializes in data driven methods and analysis to inform policy for national security.

As a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC, his research focused on one of the most pressing technical issues of nuclear power: what to do with spent nuclear fuel. Specifically, he looked at the more short term issues surrounding interim storage as they affect the structure of the back end of the fuel cycle. He focuses mainly on countries with strong nuclear power growth such as South Korea and China.

Rob’s interest in policy and nuclear issues began during his fellowship in the 2008 Public Policy and Nuclear Threats program at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at UC San Diego. In 2010, he also participated in the PONI Nuclear Scholars Initiative at CSIS.

Before coming to CISAC in 2011, Rob received his Ph.D. in high-energy physics from the University of California, Davis. Most of his graduate career was spent at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, IL where he performed a search for signs of a theory called Supersymmetry. Before beginning his graduate work, Rob spent two years at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. In 2001, Rob earned his B.S. in physics from the University of California, San Diego where, throughout his undergraduate career, he worked for NASA. 

Robert Forrest

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Rob Forrest is currently a member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories where his research interests include nuclear power, cybersecurity, and nonproliferation. As a member of the systems research group, he specializes in data driven methods and analysis to inform policy  for national security.

As a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC, his research focused on one of the most pressing technical issues of nuclear power: what to do with spent nuclear fuel. Specifically, he looked at the more short term issues surrounding interim storage as they affect the structure of the back end of the fuel cycle. He focuses mainly on countries with strong nuclear power growth such as South Korea and China.

Rob’s interest in policy and nuclear issues began during his fellowship in the 2008 Public Policy and Nuclear Threats program at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at UC San Diego. In 2010, he also participated in the PONI Nuclear Scholars Initiative at CSIS.

Before coming to CISAC in 2011, Rob received his Ph.D. in high-energy physics from the University of California, Davis. Most of his graduate career was spent at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, IL where he performed a search for signs of a theory called Supersymmetry. Before beginning his graduate work, Rob spent two years at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. In 2001, Rob earned his B.S. in physics from the University of California, San Diego where, throughout his undergraduate career, he worked for NASA. 

 

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Computation and Society: The Case of Privacy and Fairness

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Abstract: Fueled with rapidly growing data sets and with breakthroughs in machine learning, algorithms are informing and often even making decisions that affect all aspects of life. All the way from which news articles we are exposed to and which ads we see to input to sentencing decisions and in the foreseeable future to the life-and-death emergency decisions of our cars. 
 
The centrality of automatic classification brings great utility to individuals, companies and society as a whole. Nevertheless, to unleash the full potential of such algorithms we must address substantial challenges in terms of the privacy of individuals, the protection of individuals from discrimination and the accuracy of the classification algorithms under adversarial manipulations.
 
In this talk, we will discuss some of the insights we learn from recent research in computer science. Specifically, we will discuss surprising connections and differences between privacy, fairness and correctness. We will also discuss the challenges and opportunities in stronger collaborations between computer science and social sciences on these topics.
 
About the Speaker: Omer Reingold is a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. Past positions include Samsung Research America, the Weizmann Institute of Science, Microsoft Research, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, and AT&T Labs. His research is in the Foundations of Computer Science and most notably in Computational Complexity and the Foundations of Cryptography with emphasis on randomness, derandomization and explicit combinatorial constructions. He is an ACM Fellow and among his distinctions are the 2005 Grace Murray Hopper Award and the 2009 Gödel Prize.
Omer Reingold Professor of Computer Science Stanford University
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Quantifying the influence of global warming on the probability of historically unprecedented extreme climate events

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Abstract: Effective climate risk management requires robust quantification of the probability of different kinds of hazards, such as heat waves, droughts, floods, and severe storms. As a result, there has been increasing interest in the extent to which historical global warming has influenced the occurrence and severity of individual extreme climate events. However, although trends in the extremes of the seasonal- and daily-scale distributions of climate records have been analyzed for many years, quantifying the contribution of observed global warming to individual events that are unprecedented in the observed record presents a particular scientific challenge. I will describe a framework for leveraging observations and large climate model ensembles to quantify the influence of observed global warming on the probability of unprecedented extreme events. This approach is grounded on three tenets: (1) Focus on understanding the physical causes of the individual event; (2) Use formal uncertainty quantification to test the probability of those physical conditions occurring in the current climate; and (3) Use formal hypothesis testing to compare the probability of those physical conditions occurring in the current climate and a climate without human influence. My group has applied our analysis to a number of different climate variables from a number of individual events, including temperature, precipitation, soil moisture, and atmospheric circulation patterns. Together, this work has shown that global warming can influence the risk of extreme events that are unprecedented in historical experience, particularly by altering the probability of the physical conditions that are responsible for the event. In addition, given the widespread public interest in “real time” attribution, the prospects for operational attribution analysis will also be discussed.

About the Speaker: Noah Diffenbaugh is a Professor and Kimmelman Family Senior Fellow at Stanford University. He studies the climate system, including impacts on agriculture, water resources, and human health. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Geophysical Research Letters. He has served as an IPCC Lead Author, and has provided scientific expertise to the White House, the Governor of California, and U.S. Congressional offices. Recognitions include the Holton Award from the American Geophysical Union and a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation. 

Encina Hall, 2nd floor

Noah S. Diffenbaugh Professor, School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences Stanford University
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