About the Topic: A study of how two major democracies, the United States and India, responded to one of the worst humanitarian crises of the 20th century: the 1971 atrocities in East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh). This book documents the extent of Nixon and Kissinger's support for the Pakistani military regime, and India's mix of humanitarian and strategic motivations in its 1971 war, which created an independent Bangladesh.

About the Speaker: Gary Bass is a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (Knopf, forthcoming September 2013); Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (Knopf); and Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton). A former reporter for The Economist, he has written often for The New York Times, as well as writing for The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and other publications.

He has written academic articles and book chapters on human rights and international justice. He has been a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University and a visiting professor of law and government at Harvard Law School. He got his Ph.D. and A.B. at Harvard.

About the topic: The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees approached CISAC last year to collaborate on a project to improve conditions among global refugee communities.  This has led to a multidisciplinary partnership involving CISAC, students from across the Stanford campus and at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. Professors, NGOs, physicians, architects and other professionals have all volunteered time and expertise.  The project led to a Law School class, "Rethinking Refugee Communities," co-taught by CISAC's Tino Cuéllar and IDEO's Leslie Witt.  Four students representing teams from the class recently traveled to refugee camps in western Ethiopia on the border with Sudan.  They conducted field research for their projects focused on camp communications; early camp setup and registration; food security and economic sustainability; and host community relations.

Speakers include:

Parth Bhakta, Co-term senior and first-year graduate student, Computer Science

Beth Duff-Brown,Communications and Editorial Manager, CISAC

Jessica Miranda Garcia, Second-year graduate student, International Policy Studies

Benjamin Rudolph, Senior, Computer Science

Devorah West, Second-year graduate student, International Policy Studies

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar (Host), Co-Director, CISAC; Co-Instructor, “Rethinking Refugee Communities” 

The Islamic Republic of Iran continues to defy UN Security Council resolutions calling for an end to its uranium enrichment program. Is Iran trying to develop nuclear weapons, as many fear, or does it just want to produce nuclear energy, as the Tehran government claims? What would be the likely consequences if Iran does get the bomb? What diplomatic and military options are available to address this serious crisis? Four expert panelists will discuss this issue.

Dr. Sun’s science seminar will focus on China's nuclear doctrine, introducing its decision-making regime and history, its major principles on nuclear weapons development and employment, and its position on and approach to the arms control.

About the speaker: Dr. Sun Xiangli is the director of the Arms Control Research Division of the Center for Strategic Studies (CSS), China Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP). Before her entering into CSS in 2008, she worked at the Beijing Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics (IAPCM) since 1993. During 1995 to 1996 and in early 2008, she worked at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University, as a visiting scholar. Her research focuses on arms control and international security such as verification technologies for nuclear disarmament, China's nuclear strategy, U.S. nuclear policies, and Proliferation issues. She received her B.S. in nuclear physics from Peking University in 1990, M.S. in nuclear physics from the Graduate School of the CAEP in 1993, and PhD in international politics from Peking University in 2001.

A central dilemma persists for national space actors: satellites are critical to economic, scientific, and national security activities, but spacecraft are vulnerable to malfunction, environmental failure, and hostile disruptions. 'Distributed satellite' mission approaches may provide a means to supplement the security of certain satellite systems by increasing both redundancy and physical dispersion. But how do national leaders make decisions between satellite architectures given these overall risks and unknown development costs? This talk will review some current context in American space programs and present a formal model based on parallel Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) for analysis of satellite architecture decisions.

Dr. Connell will give an overview of radiological terrorism, focused on high activity radiation sources in the US and the risk they pose for malevolent use. He has been involved in developing countermeasures to radiological terrorism and will discuss some of the current efforts by the US to reduce this risk. The main thrust of his talk will be about how the risks can be managed.

Dr. Connell is a Senior Scientist with the Systems Analysis Group at Sandia National Laboratories. He is a technical advisor on unconventional nuclear warfare, and radiological/nuclear terrorism to DOE, DHS, and the DOD. He has served as a subject matter expert on a number of Defense Science Board Studies dealing with unconventional nuclear warfare and radiological terrorism. In 2004, Dr. Connell worked with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to help identify and locate high risk radiation sources in Iraq and also served in Baghdad as a member of the Iraq Survey Group, Nuclear Team. He has published several reports on the risk of radiological terrorism and the vulnerability of cesium chloride irradiators. He was a committee member on the 2008 National Academy of Sciences Committee on Radiation Source Use and Replacement. Prior to working at Sandia National Laboratories, Dr. Connell was a Naval Officer and taught nuclear propulsion theory at the Naval Nuclear Power School in Orlando Florida. He has a B.S. with High Honor in Mechanical Engineering from Michigan Technological University and a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of New Mexico.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, the success of antibiotics and vaccines in controlling or eradicating infectious diseases (ID) worldwide resulted in decreased emphasis on development of ID therapeutics. The emergence in the past three decades of HIV, SARS, West Nile, avian flu, swine flu, Ebola, and the potential for bioterrorist attacks has reversed this trend and renewed interest in treatment and prophylaxis of ID. Unfortunately, because many diseases are prevalent primarily in developing nations (e.g., malaria, TB, Chagas), potential sales of bioterrorist pathogens are limited mainly to orders for government stockpiles (e.g., anthrax, smallpox, botulinum toxin), and the cost of anti-infective clinical trials is high, traditional large pharmaceutical companies have cut back R&D resources in this arena. To combat this investment shortfall, a new paradigm has emerged where public-private partnerships between the NIH, World Health Organization, private foundations, academia, and non-profits, are beginning to function like pharmaceutical companies to advance the development of promising ID drugs, even when there is little opportunity for profit. This talk will discuss the growing need for ID therapeutics, present some new models for discovering and developing them, and provide examples of public-private partnerships that have advanced therapeutics for specific infectious diseases.

About the speaker: Dr. Jon C. Mirsalis is Managing Director of the Biosciences Division and Executive Director of Preclinical Development at SRI International in Menlo Park, CA. Dr. Mirsalis is an internationally recognized expert in the development of drugs for infectious diseases. He manages two large programs for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for the development of promising therapeutics for the prevention and treatment of a broad range of infectious diseases including TB, malaria, influenza, polio, anthrax, plague, and Ebola. He has personally been involved in the development of over 50 therapeutics that have entered clinical trials and several have already reached the market. Before joining SRI in 1981, Dr. Mirsalis was a postdoctoral fellow at the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology, where he developed the in vivo-in vitro hepatocyte DNA repair assay, which is now widely used as a screen for potential carcinogens by government and industry. He is the author of over 140 publications and abstracts. Dr. Mirsalis received his B.S. degree in zoology/molecular biology from Kent State University, his M.S. degree in genetics from North Carolina State University, and holds Ph.D. degrees in toxicology and genetics from North Carolina State University. Dr. Mirsalis has an adjunct faculty appointment with the University of California-Santa Cruz, where he lectures regularly on genetic toxicology and carcinogenesis. He has recently served on the Board of Scientific Councilors for the National Toxicology Program, the Advisory Board for the Critical Path Institute, and is a past member of the FDA’s Over-the-Country Product Review Committee. Dr. Mirsalis has been certified by the American Board of Toxicology since 1983.