Abstract: DNA synthesis providers form the primary biosecurity safety net for the synthetic biology industry. Twist’s silicon-based DNA synthesis platform allows for synthesis of 2-3 orders of magnitude more DNA in the same footprint as traditional methods. This poses a challenge to existing labor-intensive biosecurity screening practices as recommended by US government guidance. Can the technical and regulatory environments adapt to lower the cost and increase throughput of screening while maintaining or even improving detection accuracy? This talk will provide an overview of current best practices, review technical gaps in existing regulatory guidance and suggest possible improvements to help continue to power the rapid scientific and economic development of synthetic biology.

About the Speaker: James Diggans leads the Bioinformatics and Biosecurity group at Twist Bioscience, a DNA synthesis company based in San Francisco, CA. The group develops algorithms and predictive models and builds large-scale distributed computing systems supporting Twist’s next generation synthesis technology, including biosecurity and export control screening systems. He currently represents Twist’s membership to the International Gene Synthesis Consortium and to the US Department of Commerce/BIS Materials Technical Advisory Committee.

Dr. Diggans received his PhD from George Mason University and previously led the computational biology group at MITRE, designing software-defined biosensors and battlefield chem/bio sensor fusion systems. He has also worked in molecular diagnostics spending five years building and validating machine learning algorithms for cancer detection from tissue biopsy. 

Abstract: The term "natural disasters" diminishes the key role that the human context plays in turning a natural event into a disaster. In this talk, I present scientific insights into the physical processes governing the onset and evolution of extreme events and discuss how this improved understanding the challenges and opportunities that these present for decision-makers and communities at risk. More specifically, I will focus on three disasters of special current relevance, ice-sheet disintegration, coastal risk and injection-induced seismicity. The common denominator of what at first glance might seem like disparate systems is multiphase flow. The dynamic interactions between multiple solid and fluid phases, such as ice and melt-water; vegetation and waves; rocks and wastewater; give rise to drastic nonlinearities that govern abrupt changes in system behavior reflected in extreme events.

Abstract: Current technologies and practices have created large stores of medical data, including electronic medical records, genomic data, and mobile-health measurements.  There is great promise for discovery and implementation of more efficient and effective health care, but there are also tensions between the sharing of data and the ability to make assurances about security and privacy to patients and study participants.  I will discuss these challenges in the setting of genomic research and medical record data mining.  In many cases, social mechanisms are likely to be the more reliable safeguards than technical mechanisms for privacy, security, and obfuscation.

About the Speaker: Russ Biagio Altman is a professor of bioengineering, genetics, medicine, and biomedical data science (and of computer science, by courtesy) and past chairman of the Bioengineering Department at Stanford University. His primary research interests are in the application of computing and informatics technologies to problems relevant to medicine. He is particularly interested in methods for understanding drug action at molecular, cellular, organism and population levels.  His lab studies how human genetic variation impacts drug response (e.g. http://www.pharmgkb.org/). Other work focuses on the analysis of biological molecules to understand the actions, interactions and adverse events of drugs (http://feature.stanford.edu/).  He helps lead an FDA-supported Center of Excellence in Regulatory Science & Innovation (https://pharm.ucsf.edu/cersi). Dr. Altman holds an A.B. from Harvard College, and M.D. from Stanford Medical School, and a Ph.D. in Medical Information Sciences from Stanford. He received the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians (ACP), the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine, IOM) of the National Academies.  He is a past-President, founding board member, and a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), and a past-President of the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics (ASCPT).  He has chaired the Science Board advising the FDA Commissioner, currently serves on the NIH Director’s Advisory Committee, and is Co-Chair of the IOM Drug Forum.  He is an organizer of the annual Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (http://psb.stanford.edu/), and a founder of Personalis, Inc.  Dr. Altman is board certified in Internal Medicine and in Clinical Informatics. He received the Stanford Medical School graduate teaching award in 2000, and mentorship award in 2014.

Abstract: In the 1970s, soaring oil prices provided huge revenues to oil producing Arab countries, which, together with private Arab companies and individuals, invested billions of dollars in the U.S. economy. The influx of Arab petodollars drew mixed reactions from Americans. Some feared that wealthy Arabs were “buying up America” and gaining control over the nation’s political, economic, educational, and cultural institutions. Others welcomed Arab investment as a boon to the U.S. economy and to global stability. Petrodollars also played a key role in Arab American history. Demeaning portrayals of oil-rich Arabs in media and government discourse—reaching a crescendo in the FBI’s “Abscam” sting operations of 1978-1980—goaded Arab Americans to adopt more organized methods of combating anti-Arab stereotypes. Salim Yaqub draws on his new book, Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.-Middle East Relations in the 1970s, to explore the complex legacy of Arab petrodollars in American life.

About the Speaker: Salim Yaqub is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Director of UCSB’s Center for Cold War Studies and International History. He is the author of Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (University of North Carolina, 2004) and of several articles and book chapters on the history of U.S. foreign relations, the international politics of the Middle East, and Arab American political activism. His second book, Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.-Middle East Relations in the 1970s, was published by Cornell University Press in September 2016.

Abstract: Deterrence is one of the most central concepts in international relations scholarship. Countries can dissuade changes to the status quo, according to the logic of deterrence, by threatening an opponent with pain (deterrence by punishment) or by reducing the probability that an opponent will achieve its aims (deterrence by denial). In the realm of international security, most deterrence theorists assume that states need military capabilities to deter by punishment or denial. Deterrence works, based on this line of thinking, because states can use military power to destroy cities, bomb critical military targets, or blunt land invasions. It is also possible, however, to punish an adversary without invoking destruction militarily. Yet deterrence through non-military means remains poorly understood in international relations. This project develops a theory to identify the conditions under which countries can deter opponents without using threats of military force. I explore the implications of this theory in one particular context: the development of dual-use nuclear technology. Having the capability to build nuclear weapons — a condition known as “nuclear latency” — may provide countries with deterrence benefits that we normally associate with having a nuclear arsenal. When states achieve nuclear latency, they (implicitly) threaten to develop nuclear weapons at some point in the future. The threat here is to pursue a policy that others would find undesirable, not to physically destroy things of value on another state’s territory, as in traditional deterrence theory. Does this kind of threat discourage others from meddling in a country’s affairs? This study presents the results of an analysis designed to identify the effects of nuclear latency (and nuclear arsenals) on the onset of international conflict from 1945 to 2000, drawing on a new dataset of sensitive dual-use nuclear plants in 32 countries.

About the Speaker: Matthew Fuhrmann is an associate professor of political science and Ray A. Rothrock `77 Fellow at Texas A&M University. He was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2016 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. He is the author of Atomic Assistance: How “Atoms for Peace” Programs Cause Nuclear Insecurity (Cornell University Press, 2012) and the coauthor of Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy (Cambridge University Press, 2016). His work has been published or is forthcoming in peer-reviewed journals such as American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, International Organization, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, and Journal of Politics. He has also written opinion pieces for The Atlantic (online), The Christian Science Monitor, Slate, and USA Today. He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. You can follow him on Twitter @mcfuhrmann.

Abstract: What role do negotiations play in the midst of interstate wars? Extant scholarship has largely treated negotiations as being irrelevant to understanding a conflict's trajectory, or as being a direct reflection of hostilities on the battlefield. Neither view is supported by historical readings or empirical patterns of intra-war diplomacy. I present an alternative view of negotiations as being instrumental. Diplomatic bargaining not only occurs in response to battlefield outcomes, but is also used deceptively by disadvantaged belligerents to stall for time, manage political pressures, and regroup militarily. Using two new daily-level datasets of battles and diplomatic activity, I show that negotiations in post-1945 wars extend conflict when the war initiator has an advantage in fighting, occur in response to lop-sided battle outcomes, dampen the intensity of combat, and are associated with subsequent improvements in the war target's success on the battlefield. This framework of instrumental negotiations shows that the effect of intra-war diplomacy is conditional on the state of hostilities, and has substantial implications on our understanding of war termination and conflict resolution.

About the Speaker: Eric Min is a CISAC Predoctoral Fellow for 2016-2017 and a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Stanford University. His research is focused on interstate diplomacy, information gathering and sharing during crises, and applications of machine learning and text analysis techniques to declassified documents related to conflict and foreign policy. 

Abstract: Margaret Levi attempts to understand the conditions under which individuals act beyond their narrow economic interests in situations where logic suggests that self-interest should triumph. In this paper she investigates what kinds of governance arrangements make it possible for leaders to successfully ask members to undertake costly actions in the interest of others.  The answer has two parts:  first, creating confidence in information that then is the basis for beliefs about the state of the world; second, the development of an expanded community of fate, in which individuals understand their own well-being as implicated with that of others beyond their narrow circle of family and tribe.  Both factors affect what individuals understand as the facts of the case and, therefore, the kinds of actions they are willing to undertake. 

About the Speaker: Margaret Levi is a comparative political economist who focuses on what creates productive relationships between governments and citizens, organizations and their members. She is Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) and Professor of Political Science, Stanford University.  She is Jere L. Bacharach Professor Emerita of International Studies, Department of Political Science, University of Washington, where she was director of the CHAOS (Comparative Historical Analysis of Organizations and States) Center and formerly the Harry Bridges Chair and Director of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies. She earned her BA from Bryn Mawr College in 1968 and her PhD from Harvard University in 1974. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. She is a past president of the American Political Science Association. In 2014 she received the William H. Riker Prize for Political Science.  Levi and her husband, Robert Kaplan, are avid collectors of Australian Aboriginal art. They have promised or given over 150 pieces of Australian Aboriginal art to major American art museums, including the Seattle Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  

Abstract: All nations that have selected a strategy for the long-term management of high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel have opted for disposal in a deep-mined, geologic repository.  Choosing a site for such a facility has been problematic.  Of the two dozen efforts that have been undertaken in the United States and abroad over the last half decade, only six remain on track, and only three have reached what appears to be a stable outcome.  Typically, a country organizes its waste management program to compare at least two sites before making a final choice.  All those sites must be shown to be technically suitable based on predetermined criteria.  For countries like the United States, which can site a repository in a variety of host geologic formations, these criteria are generic in nature.  Basing a siting decision on generic criteria especially requires the exercise of discretion.  This circumstance produces tough dilemmas that may be quite difficult to overcome credibly.

About the Speaker: Dr. Metlay is a member of the Senior Professional Staff of the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (NWTRB).  He received his Bachelor of Science degrees from Caltech in molecular biology and medieval history and his Masters and Doctoral degrees in public policy from the University of California, Berkeley.  He taught political science at Indiana University and MIT.  Dr. Metlay has authored numerous publications dealing with technology policy, regulation, organization behavior, and radioactive waste.  He has worked in the Carter White House and with the Secretary of Energy on radioactive waste issues.  Dr. Metlay has testified before Congress and several state legislative committees.