FSI scholars produce research aimed at creating a safer world and examing the consequences of security policies on institutions and society. They look at longstanding issues including nuclear nonproliferation and the conflicts between countries like North and South Korea. But their research also examines new and emerging areas that transcend traditional borders – the drug war in Mexico and expanding terrorism networks. FSI researchers look at the changing methods of warfare with a focus on biosecurity and nuclear risk. They tackle cybersecurity with an eye toward privacy concerns and explore the implications of new actors like hackers.
Along with the changing face of conflict, terrorism and crime, FSI researchers study food security. They tackle the global problems of hunger, poverty and environmental degradation by generating knowledge and policy-relevant solutions.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Graduate School of Business
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-5015
Lawrence Wein is the Jeffrey S. Skoll Professor of Management Science at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, and an affiliated faculty member at CISAC. After getting a PhD in Operations Research from Stanford University in 1988, he spent 14 years at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, where he was the DEC Leaders for Manufacturing Professor of Management Science. His research interests include mathematical models in operations management, medicine and biology.
Since 2001, he has analyzed a variety of homeland security problems. His homeland security work includes four papers in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, on an emergency response to a smallpox attack, an emergency response to an anthrax attack, a biometric analysis of the US-VISIT Program, and an analysis of a bioterror attack on the milk supply. He has also published the Washington Post op-ed "Unready for Anthrax" (2003) and the New York Times op-ed "Got Toxic Milk?", and has written papers on port security, indoor remediation after an anthrax attack, and the detention and removal of illegal aliens.
For his homeland security research, Wein has received several awards from the International Federation of Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS), including the Koopman Prize for the best paper in military operations research, the INFORMS Expository Writing Award, the INFORMS President’s Award for contributions to society, the Philip McCord Morse Lectureship, the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize for best research publication, and the George E. Kimball Medal. He was Editor-in-Chief of Operations Research from 2000 to 2005, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Whitfield Diffie is a consulting scholar at CISAC. He was a visiting scholar in 2009-2010 and an affiliate from 2010-2012. He is best known for the discovery of the concept of public key cryptography, in 1975, which he developed along with Stanford University Electrical Engineering Professor Martin Hellman. Public key cryptography, which revolutionized not only cryptography but also the cryptographic community, now underlies the security of internet commerce.
During the 1980s, Diffie served as manager of secure systems research at Northern Telecom. In 1991, he joined Sun Microsystems as distinguished engineer and remained as Sun fellow and chief security officer until the spring of 2009.
Diffie spent the 1990s working to protect the individual and business right to use encryption, for which he argues in the book Privacy on the Line, the Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption, which he wrote jointly with Susan Landau. Diffie is a Marconi fellow and the recipient of a number of awards including the National Computer Systems Security Award (given jointly by NIST and NSA) and the Franklin Institute's Levy Prize.
Marc J. Ventresca is University Lecturer in Management Studies at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, Fellow of Wolfson College, and University Fellow at the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization. For 2004-5 he is a Research Fellow in Organizational Learning and Homeland Security, CISAC, IIS, Stanford University.
His research and teaching interests focus on institutions, organizations, and industry entrepreneurship; organizational learning; organization design and managing change; environmental management; power and leadership in organizations, and economic sociology of strategy.
He earned his Ph.D. in sociology at Stanford University, after master's degrees in policy analysis and education and in sociology. He has taught at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois, the Copenhagen Business School, the Center for Work, Technology, and Organizations at Stanford University, and the Stanford Institute for Research on Higher Education.
Prior to a faculty career, Dr. Ventresca worked as a policy analyst at the Congressional Budget Office in Washington D.C., studied language and politics in Florence, Italy, and worked as a technical writer for hopeful start-ups in Silicon Valley.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room, East 207, Encina Hall
Forty-two years ago this week, the United States and the Soviet Union came within a hair's breadth of unleashing nuclear destruction upon one another during the Cuban missile crisis, Robert McNamara, defense secretary under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, recounted to scholars and others gathered at a dinner Oct. 18 organized by the Center for International Security and Cooperation.
In post-Cold War meetings between principal players in the crisis, including Soviet generals and Fidel Castro, it became clear that the decision-making process of all three governments had been distorted by misinformation and misjudgment, he said. "Events will always slip out of control," McNamara said as he repeated one of the lessons delineated in the 2004 documentary Fog of War: The indefinite combination of human fallibility with nuclear weapons leads to human destruction. "The only way to eliminate the risk is to eliminate nuclear weapons," he said.
The current weapons policy of the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is folly, the 88-year-old McNamara said. In 45 years of working on nuclear weapons issues, "I've never seen a document outlining a plan that shows how we would benefit by using nuclear weapons," he said. To use such weapons against a nuclear state is suicide, to use them against a non-nuclear state would be politically unwise and morally repugnant, he added.
Slayton’s research and teaching examine the relationships between and among risk, governance, and expertise, with a focus on international security and cooperation since World War II. Slayton’s current book project, Shadowing Cybersecurity, examines the historical emergence of cybersecurity expertise. Shadowing Cybersecurity shows how efforts to establish credible expertise in corporate, governmental, and non-governmental contexts have produced varying and sometimes conflicting expert practices. Nonetheless, all cybersecurity experts wrestle with the irreducible uncertainties that characterize intelligent adversaries, and the fundamental inability to prove that systems are secure. The book shows how cybersecurity experts have paradoxically gained credibility by making threats and vulnerabilities visible, while acknowledging that more always remain in the shadows.
Slayton’s first book, Arguments that Count: Physics, Computing, and Missile Defense, 1949-2012 (MIT Press, 2013), shows how the rise of a new field of expertise in computing reshaped public policies and perceptions about the risks of missile defense in the United States. In 2015, Arguments that Count won the Computer History Museum Prize. In 2016, Slayton was awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER grant for her project “Enacting Cybersecurity Expertise.” In 2019, Slayton was also a recipient of the United States Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, for her NSF CAREER project.
Karthika Sasikumar began her education in Hyderabad, India. She obtained her undergraduate degree from St. Francis College for Women. From 1995 to 1999, she was a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, where she earned Master's and M.Phil Degrees from the School of International Studies.
Dr. Sasikumar received her Ph.D. from the Government Department at Cornell University in 2006. Her dissertation explores the interaction between India and the international nuclear nonproliferation order.
Before coming to San Jose State University, where she is a Professor of Political Science, Dr. Sasikumar was a Program Associate at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Associate in the International Security Program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has also been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia’s Liu Institute for Global Issues in Vancouver, and a Predoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University.
In 2010-11, she spent a year at the Belfer Center as the first Stanton Nuclear Security Junior Faculty Fellow. She was the Chair of the SJSU Senate from 2023 to 2025.
Her research and teaching interests are in International Relations theory, international regimes, global security, migration, and national identity.
CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
Paul K. MacDonald is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University and a 2004-2005 predoctoral fellow at CISAC. His research focuses on how great powers utilize the institution of imperial rule in order to exert control over less powerful polities in the international system. Most recently, he has published research on the epistemological foundations of rational choice theory in the American Political Science Review and on the relevance of evolutionary biology to international politics in International Security.
I am a child of the Cold War. As such, my thinking for decades was conditioned by the great issue of that era: How to maintain freedom in the face of our perceptions of Soviet ambitions for world domination?
For the first few decades of the Cold War, the United States strategy for achieving this objective was containment backed up with a powerful nuclear deterrence. But as the nuclear arms race heated up, it became increasingly clear that this strategy risked precipitating a nuclear holocaust. Thus, by the late sixties, nuclear arms control had become the overriding security issue - certainly it dominated my thinking on security during that era.
But with the ending of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear holocaust receded and arms control, as we had practiced it during that era, was no longer the dominant security issue. The most serious threat to the United States became nuclear weapons in the hands of failed states or terrorists - used not in a standard military operation, but in extortive or apocalyptic ways. Therefore, in the present era, preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons replaces arms control as the organizing principle for our security. Certainly it has dominated my thinking on security for the last decade.
Oksenberg Conference Room
William Perry is the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor (emeritus) at Stanford University. He is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and the Hoover Institution, and serves as director of the Preventive Defense Project. He is an expert in U.S. foreign policy, national security and arms control. He was the co-director of CISAC from 1988 to 1993, during which time he was also a part-time professor at Stanford. He was a part-time lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at Santa Clara University from 1971 to 1977.
Perry was the 19th secretary of defense for the United States, serving from February 1994 to January 1997. He previously served as deputy secretary of defense (1993-1994) and as under secretary of defense for research and engineering (1977-1981). Dr. Perry currently serves on the Defense Policy Board (DPB). He is on the board of directors of Covant and several emerging high-tech companies. His previous business experience includes serving as a laboratory director for General Telephone and Electronics (1954-1964); founder and president of ESL Inc. (1964-1977); executive vice-president of Hambrecht & Quist Inc. (1981-1985); and founder and chairman of Technology Strategies & Alliances (1985-1993). He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
From 1946 to 1947, Perry was an enlisted man in the Army Corps of Engineers, and served in the Army of Occupation in Japan. He joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps in 1948 and was a second lieutenant in the Army Reserves from 1950 to 1955. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1997 and the Knight Commander of the British Empire in 1998. Perry has received a number of other awards including the Department of Defense Distinguished Service Medal (1980 and 1981), and Outstanding Civilian Service Medals from the Army (1962 and 1997), the Air Force (1997), the Navy (1997), the Defense Intelligence Agency (1977 and 1997), NASA (1981) and the Coast Guard (1997). He received the American Electronic Association's Medal of Achievement (1980), the Eisenhower Award (1996), the Marshall Award (1997), the Forrestal Medal (1994), and the Henry Stimson Medal (1994). The National Academy of Engineering selected him for the Arthur Bueche Medal in 1996. He has received awards from the enlisted personnel of the Army, Navy, and the Air Force. He has received decorations from the governments of Albania, Bahrain, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Poland, Slovenia, and Ukraine. He received a BS and MS from Stanford University and a PhD from Pennsylvania State University, all in mathematics.
