Sonja Schmid (speaker) is a social science research associate at Stanford University. Having received her Ph.D. in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University, she is now a science fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, and affiliated with the Program in Science, Technology and Society at Stanford. Her research has focused on understanding complex decision-making processes at the interface between science, technology, and the state in the Cold War Soviet context, and is based on extensive archival research and narrative interviews with nuclear energy specialists in Russia. She is currently working on a book about reactor design choices and the development of the civilian nuclear industry in the Soviet Union. In addition, she is involved in an international research project on Cold War Technopolitics and Colonialism, where she works on Soviet technology transfer to Central and Eastern Europe. Her research interests also include risk communication, and the popularization of science and technology, subjects on which she has published in the past.

Rebecca Slayton (respondent) is a lecturer in the Science, Technology and Society Program at Stanford University and a CISAC affiliate. In 2004-2005 she was a CISAC science fellow. Her research examines how technical judgments are generated, taken up, and given significance in international security contexts. She is currently working on a book which uses the history of the U.S. ballistic missile defense program to study the relationships between and among technology, expertise, and the media. Portions of this work have been published in journals such as History and Technology and have been presented at academic conferences. As a postdoctoral fellow in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she recently completed an NSF-funded project entitled Public Science: Discourse about the Strategic Defense Initiative, 1983-1988. As a physical chemist, she developed ultrafast laser experiments in condensed matter systems and published several articles in physics journals. She also received the AAAS Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellowship in 2000, and has worked as a science journalist for a daily paper and for Physical Review Focus. She earned her doctorate in chemistry from Harvard University in 2002.

Carol Atkinson (speaker) retired as a lieutenant colonel from the U.S. Air Force in 2005. While in the military she served in a wide variety of management and operational positions in the fields of intelligence, targeting, and combat assessment. During the Cold War she flew on the Strategic Air Command's nuclear airborne command post as a target analyst. During Operation Desert Storm (1991) she worked on the intelligence staff in Riyadh, and, subsequently, on the contingency planning staff in Dhahran/Khobar, Saudi Arabia. While in the military, she taught at the Air Force Academy and the Air Force's Command and Staff College.

Atkinson holds a PhD in international relations from Duke University, an MA in geography from Indiana University, and a BS from the United States Air Force Academy (5th class with women). She is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at the Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California. Atkinson's primary research focuses on U.S. military-to-military contacts as channels of international norm diffusion. She is also working on a project examining the influence of educational exchange programs on democratization and a project on the social construction of the biological warfare threat in the United States.

Jessica Weeks (respondent) is a doctoral candidate in the Stanford Department of Political Science. Her research interests include foreign policy decision-making in non-democratic regimes, the settlement of military crises, and the effects of foreign military interventions on target states. She will be a pre-doctoral fellow at CISAC during 2007-2008. Jessica received her BA in political science from The Ohio State University, and an MA in international history and politics from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland.

Charles Perrow (speaker) is an emeritus professor of sociology at Yale University and a visiting scholar at CISAC. An organizational theorist, his latest research is presented in The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters (Princeton, spring 2007). Among his award-winning research is Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of American Capitalism (Princeton, 2002), winner of the Max Weber award for best book on organizations from the American Sociological Association in 2003. His recent articles include "Organizational or Executive Failures?" and "Inside the Nuclear Plant's Executive Office," both published in Contemporary Sociology. Perrow currently serves on a National Academy of Science panel on the possibilities of certifying software. He received his BA, MA, and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, all in sociology.

Peter G. Neumann (respondent) has been in SRI's Computer Science Lab since September 1971. He is concerned with computer systems and networks, trustworthiness/dependability, high assurance, security, reliability, survivability, safety, and many risks-related issues such as voting-system integrity, crypto policy, social implications, and human needs including privacy. He moderates the Association for Computing Machinery's Risks Forum, edits Communications of the ACM's monthly Inside Risks column, chairs the ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, and chairs the National Committee for Voting Integrity. He is a Fellow of the ACM, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and is also an SRI Fellow. He received the National Computer System Security Award in 2002 and the ACM SIGSAC (Special Interest Group on Security, Audit, and Control) Outstanding Contributions Award in 2005. He is a member of the U.S. Government Accountability Office Executive Council on Information Management and Technology, and the California Office of Privacy Protection advisory council. He has doctorates from Harvard and Darmstadt.

After the DPRK's nuclear test on October 9, 2006, denuclearization of the DPRK became an urgent issue that must be achieved as soon as possible to restrain an arms race in Northeast Asia. For denuclearization of the DPRK, issues of verification of dismantlement of the DPRK nuclear weapons programs are the most critical elements if an agreement can be reached between the U.S. and the DPRK. Objectives of the verification and dismantlement of the DPRK nuclear weapons programs are disposition of currently existing nuclear material, nuclear weapons, relevant facilities, nuclear workers and documents, and discontinuation of future clandestine production of those things, i.e., terminating the nuclear production capability of the DPRK. Kang will speak about technical aspects of the DPRK nuclear weapons program, including an idea on the disablement of 5 MWe graphite reactors at Yongbyon and major issues in the verification and dismantlement of the DPRK nuclear weapons programs.

Jungmin Kang is a science fellow at CISAC. Kang brings to the study of nuclear policy issues considerable expertise in technical analyses of nuclear energy issues, based on his studies in South Korea, Japan, and the United States. Kang has co-authored articles on the proliferation-resistance of advanced fuel cycles, spent-fuel storage, plutonium disposition, and South Korea's undeclared uranium enrichment and plutonium experiments. He has contributed many popular articles to South Korea's newspapers and magazines and is frequently interviewed about spent-fuel issues and the negotiations over North Korea's nuclear-weapon program. Kang's recent research focuses on technical analysis of issues related to nuclear weapons and energy of North Korea as well as spent-fuel issues in Northeast Asia. Kang serves on South Korea's Presidential Commission on Sustainable Development where he advises on nuclear energy policy and spent fuel management.

Kang received a PhD in nuclear engineering from Tokyo University, Japan, and MS and BS degrees in nuclear engineering from Seoul National University, South Korea. Kang worked in Princeton University's Program on Science and Global Security for two years in 1998-2000.

Leonard Weiss is a senior science fellow at CISAC and a consultant to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He began his professional career as a researcher in mathematical system theory at the Research Institute for Advanced Studies in Baltimore. This was followed by tenured professorships in applied mathematics and electrical engineering at Brown University and the University of Maryland. During this period he published widely in the applied mathematics literature. In 1976 he received a Congressional Science Fellowship that resulted in a career change. For more than two decades he worked for Senator John Glenn as the staff director of both the Senate Subcommittee on Energy and Nuclear Proliferation and the Committee on Governmental Affairs. He was the chief architect of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978 and other legislation sponsored by Senator Glenn. Since retiring from the Senate staff in 1999, he has published numerous articles on nonproliferation issues for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Arms Control Today, and other journals. In 2003-4 he chaired the Federation of American Scientists' Advisory Committee on Weapons in Space which produced the FAS report entitled "Ensuring America's Space Security." His research at CISAC includes an assessment of the impact on the nonproliferation regime of nuclear trade with non-signers of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Within the last 10 years several non-proliferation programs have been realized in Uzbekistan. Those programs include actions on upgrading physical protection systems of facilities possessing nuclear reactors and powerful radioactive sources, measures on improving nuclear security and radioactive safety, equipping the country's exit/entry points in order to prevent illicit trafficking of nuclear and radioactive materials, improving safeguards and radioactive monitoring of environment. Special attention was given to conversion of research reactors to low enrichment uranium and treatment of highly enriched fresh and spent reactor fuel. The programs have been performed in cooperation with U.S. energy and defense departments, the International Atomic Energy Agency and related institutions.

Bekhzod Yuldashev is a CISAC science fellow. He served as a consultant-advisor at the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2006-2007. Prior to that, he was director-general of the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Uzbekistan Academy of Science from 1990 to 2006. From 1984 to 1990, he served as head of the laboratory in the Physical Technical Institute in Tashkent, where he had been a senior researcher since 1972.

Yuldashev has published about 300 scientific papers dedicated to various subjects of particle and nuclear physics in the wide range of primary energies. In particular, he experimentally obtained the first evidence of dibaryon resonances, discovered the effect of emitting energetic nucleons from local subsystems in nuclei, observed anomalously high production of eta-mesons and cumulative delta-isobars on nuclei and has experimentally proven that production and decay of vector and tensor resonances are the origins of so-called leading pions with an opposite sign to the primary one in high energy interactions. He has more than 20 patents on nuclear applications.

He is a full member of the Academy of Science of Uzbekistan and served as the academy's president from September 2000 through November 2005. In 2000-2004 he was elected a Member of Parliament of the Republic of Uzbekistan, and in 2004-2005 was elected a Senator.

He is a fellow of Islamic Academy of Sciences, a member of the American Physical Society. From 1992 to 2002, he was an elected member of the Scientific Council of the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research, in Dubna, Russia, one of two international nuclear centers in the world. He is also a member of the IAEA's Standing Advisory Group for Nuclear Applications, a fellow of the Islamic Countries Academy, and foreign member of the National Academy of Kazakhstan. He is an honorary professor of Samarkand State University and honorary doctor of the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research (2004). He won the 2004 Economic Cooperation Organization's excellence award in science and technology and the 1983 Uzbekistan State Prize for Science and Technology.

Yuldashev graduated from Tashkent and Moscow Universities in 1968. He earned his PhD in physics and mathematics from the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia, in 1971.

Suicide bombings targeting Israeli civilians were once the favored tactic of Palestinian terrorists. Israeli deaths from suicide bombings peaked in the spring of 2002, but Israeli countermeasures dramatically lowered the number of successful suicide bombings since then. This talk will assess the impact of various countermeasures on suicide bombing rates with an eye towards understanding the decline in successful suicide bombings in Israel.

Edward H. Kaplan is the William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Management Sciences at the Yale School of Management, a professor of public health at the Yale School of Medicine, and professor of engineering in the Yale Faculty of Engineering. An elected member of the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine, Kaplan uses operations research and statistical methods to study problems in public policy and management. His earlier work was devoted to evaluating HIV prevention programs, while his more recent studies focus on counterterror topics such as the tactical prevention of suicide bombings and response logistics in the event of a bioterror attack. He has also dabbled in predicting the outcomes of presidential elections and NCAA basketball tournaments. His efforts have been recognized with several awards in the fields of operations research and public health.

Despite predictions of their eradication in the 1960s, infectious diseases remain a significant cause of global health, economic, and social problems. There has been a renewed focus on the background "matrix" of infections that occur around the globe, as well as on emerging, re-emerging, and deliberately emerging (i.e. bioterror) agents. This talk will provide a global health perspective on infectious diseases in 2007, and highlight the lessons that can be learned from three conditions (HIV/AIDS, influenza, and SARS).

Daniel Libraty is an associate professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He is a member of the Center for Infectious Disease and Vaccine Research (CIDVR), and the Division of Infectious Diseases/Department of Medicine. He received his MD degree from the University of California, San Diego. He completed his post-graduate residency in internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and obtained subspecialty training in infectious diseases at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on understanding the protective and pathogenic human immune responses to emerging and re-emerging viral diseases such as dengue, hantavirus, SARS, and influenza. He has lived and traveled extensively throughout Southeast Asia and other parts of the world in the course of working on these infectious diseases.

Stephen Schneider is the Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, co-director at CESP, co-director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources, and professor by courtesy in the Department of Civil Engineering.

Schneider's current global change research interests include food and climate and other environmental and science public policy issues; ecological and economic implications of climatic change; integrated assessment of global change; climatic modeling of paleoclimates and of human impacts on climate, e.g., carbon dioxide "greenhouse effect" and environmental consequences of nuclear war. He is also interested in advancing public understanding of science and in improving formal environmental education in primary and secondary schools.

He has served as a consultant to federal agencies and-or White House staff in the Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations. In 1998, he became a foreign member of the Academia Europaea, Earth and Cosmic Sciences Section. Schneider was elected chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences Section on Atmospheric and Hydrospheric Sciences (1999-2001) and was elected to membership in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in April 2002. He was a member of the scientific staff of NCAR from 1973-1996, where he co-founded the Climate Project.

Schneider was honored in 1992 with a MacArthur Fellowship for his ability to integrate and interpret the results of global climate research. He also received, in 1991, the American Association for the Advancement of Science/Westinghouse Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology, for furthering public understanding of environmental science and its implications for public policy.

He has authored or co-authored over 200 scientific papers, proceedings, legislative testimonies, edited books and book chapters; some 120 book reviews, editorials, published newspaper and magazine interviews and popularizations. In 1975, he founded the interdisciplinary journal Climatic Change and continues to serve as its editor. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Climate and Weather and author of The Genesis Strategy: Climate and Global Survival; The Coevolution of Climate and Life; Global Warming: Are We Entering the Greenhouse Century? and Laboratory Earth: The Planetary Gamble We Can't Afford to Lose, among others. He is a frequent contributor to commercial and non-commercial print and broadcast media on climate and environmental issues.

Schneider received his BS and MS in mechanical engineering at Columbia University and his PhD in mechanical engineering and plasma physics from Columbia University in 1971.