The Society for the History of Technology has awarded its 2006 Brooke Hindle Fellowship to Sonja Schmid, a CISAC social science research associate and lecturer in Stanford's Program on Science, Technology and Society.

Schmid accepted the $10,000 award at the society's annual conference on Oct. 14. She will use it to support additional research in Russia for a book she is completing on the effects of the Chernobyl disaster on the Soviet and Russian nuclear power industry.

Tentatively titled "Producing Power: The Construction of a Civilian Nuclear Industry in the Soviet Union," the book begins with the Chernobyl explosion of April 26, 1986--"the worst accident at a civilian nuclear facility ever," Schmid notes.

The explosion ignited a fire that burned for more than 10 days and released radioactive materials over a large area of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. Some 116,000 people evacuated the area that spring and another 220,000 moved later, according to a 2005 report by a forum the International Atomic Energy Agency convened to assess the accident's economic and health legacies.

The tragedy also resulted in the trial and sentencing of plant operators and "dismissal of the Chernobyl-type reactor design as 'inherently unsafe,'" Schmid explains. Her research examines the development of institutional structures and professional cultures within the Soviet civilian nuclear industry and the history of Soviet reactor design choices.

Schmid has done extensive research in Russian archives that opened after the fall of the Soviet Union. However, "much of this history was never written down," she said, so she also interviewed more than 20 senior nuclear specialists in Russia.

Now filling in details on her largely completed historical analysis, Schmid expects to finish the book manuscript by next summer. The fellowship selection committee called her work "a path-breaking contribution to the field" of technology history. Schmid's "study revises much of what we thought we knew about the development of nuclear power in the Soviet Union," the committee wrote.

On a trip to Russia in September and October 2006, she talked with high-ranking specialists in the Soviet and current Russian nuclear industry, some of whom she met through CISAC visiting professor Siegfried Hecker. A former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Hecker continues to work with Russian scientists in cooperative threat reduction programs to secure former Soviet nuclear materials that could be used for weapons.

A source Schmid has yet to tap is the Archive of the Russian Federal Agency for Nuclear Energy, which maintains records on both military and civilian nuclear programs. The agency "has been publishing excellent series of documents on the history of the Soviet atomic bomb, or the military program," Schmid said, "but their documents on the civilian program so far remain classified." She said she will try again and that on this last visit to Russia she "was encouraged to keep doing so."

Her painstaking research stands to illuminate technological decisions with profound consequences. "While everything about the Chernobyl accident was Soviet--the reactor design, the attitude of operators, the bureaucracy--it shook a system that was designed to be safe," Schmid said. "The system, by its own standards and norms, was normal and perfectly functional," she added.

"Chernobyl is not something that 'could only happen in the Soviet Union,'" Schmid cautioned. "It could happen elsewhere."

FSI convened its second annual international conference on November 16, bringing scholars from across the university together with visiting security experts, policymakers, members of the international community, and practitioners in the fields of political science, economics, law, business, and medicine. The theme of this year's conference was "A World at Risk," juxtaposing debate and discussion on hard security issues such as nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and failed states with problems presented by "softer" security threats such as pandemic diseases, energy shocks, natural disasters, and food security and the environment.

The conference opened with welcoming remarks from Stanford Provost John Etchemendy and FSI director Coit D. Blacker, who shared their perspectives on pressing global issues and their sense of how Stanford's mission of interdisciplinary research and teaching fits into a changing world. Rounding out the opening session were remarks from former secretary of defense William J. Perry and former secretaries of state Warren Christopher and George Shultz. Secretary Perry analyzed how security threats have evolved in the 10 years since he was secretary of defense, while Secretary Christopher addressed the strategic importance of the Middle East and need for renewed diplomacy and Secretary Shultz discussed the opportunity and imperative for the United States to assume a global leadership role. The three secretaries' institutional knowledge and experience collectively established a rich context for discussion in the plenary and breakout sessions that followed.

The morning and afternoon plenary sessions offered scholarly analysis of two types of risk, with the morning session focusing on systemic issues - measuring risk, managing the nuclear nonproliferation regime, and controlling fissile materials - and the afternoon, on human security issues - improving the resiliency of critical infrastructure and managing energy shocks to oil, natural gas, and electricity markets. Plenary I was moderated by Coit D. Blacker, with Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, Scott D. Sagan, and Siegfried S. Hecker as panelists; Plenary II was moderated by Michael A. McFaul, with Stephen E. Flynn and David G. Victor as panelists.

Drawing on Pate-Cornell's earlier discussion of statistical risk analysis, Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, assured conference participants over lunch that unlike other issues being debated that day, the risk of a human influenza pandemic "is one; it is going to happen...the issue is what will it mean when it happens." His assessment showed how our global just-in-time economy makes our world extremely vulnerable to an influenza pandemic. This vulnerability, Osterholm argued, will need to be managed on a local level through family preparedness, community leadership, and business preparedness and continuity.

Overlapping breakout sessions followed the morning and afternoon plenary sessions, allowing for interaction and dialogue in smaller, less formal settings. FSI's five centers and two of FSI's programs sponsored sessions that drilled down into some of the issues discussed in the larger forum throughout the day, including:

• Center for Environmental Science and Policy (CESP): "Food Security and the Environment"
  Rosamond L. Naylor, Kenneth Cassman, and Scott Rozelle
• Center for Health Policy/Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research (CHP/PCOR): "Pandemics, Infectious Diseases, and Bioterrorism"
  Alan M. Garber, Michael Osterholm, Douglas K. Owens, and Lawrence M. Wein
• Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC): "Insurgencies, Failed States, and the Challenge of Governance"
  Jeremy M. Weinstein, Larry Diamond, and Stephen J. Stedman
• Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL): "Responding to a World at Risk: U.S. Efforts at Democracy Promotion in Russia, Iraq, and Iran"
  Michael A. McFaul, Abbas Milani, David S. Patel, and Kathryn Stoner
• Forum on Contemporary Europe (FCE): "The European Union: Politics, Economics, Terrorism"
  Amir Eshel, Josef Joffe, Hugo Paemen, and James J. Sheehan
• Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD): "China's Rise: Implications for the World Economy and Energy Markets"
  Thomas C. Heller, Fred Hu, and Edgard Habib
• Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC): "Cross Currents: Nationalism and Regionalism in Northeast Asia"
  Daniel C. Sneider, Michael H. Armacost, Gi-Wook Shin, and Xiyu Yang

The conference concluded with a cocktail reception and dinner. Peter Bergen, CNN's counterterrorism analyst and the first Western journalist to have interviewed Osama bin Laden, offered closing remarks on the successes and failures in the war on terrorism since 9/11.

A proposal to assess the societal and security implications of the female deficit in China, a study of the impact of higher education's rapid expansion in large developing economies, and incentives for provision of health care services for one billion people in rural China were among the new projects funded by Stanford's Presidential Fund for Innovation in International Studies (PFIIS) in mid-February. Planning grants for an international health and society initiative in the Indian subcontinent and psychosocial treatment for children orphaned by the tsunami in Indonesia were also awarded.

"These projects show great potential to advance human knowledge, help devise sustainable solutions, and build a better, more secure future for millions around the world," said Stanford President John Hennessy. "In launching The Stanford Challenge, we committed to marshal university resources to address some of the 21st century's great challenges in human health, international peace and security, and the environment."

The $3 million, intellectual venture capital fund was established by the Office of the President and the Stanford International Initiative in 2005 to encourage new cross-campus, interdisciplinary research and teaching among all seven schools at Stanford on three overarching global challenges: pursuing peace and security, improving governance, and advancing human well-being. The first $1 million was awarded in February 2006 to eight interdisciplinary faculty teams examining such issues as the HIV/AIDS treatment revolution in sub-Saharan Africa, why Latin America has been left behind in recent gains by developing countries, and food security and the environment.

"It's impressive to see the committed, collaborative, and innovative ways Stanford faculty are joining together in new interdisciplinary research and teaching to generate new understanding of the linkages among complex problems and train a new generation of leaders to address them effectively," said Freeman Spogli Institute Director Coit D. Blacker, chair of the International Initiative Executive Committee.

New projects qualifying for funding and their principal investigators are:

• Female Deficit and Social Stability in China: Implications for International Security. Melissa Brown, anthropological sciences; Marcus Feldman, biological sciences, and Matthew Sommer, history. As the number of surplus, marriage-age men in China approaches 47 million in 2050, this project will study factors that predict men's inability to marry before 30, the availability of social welfare to men and their families, their contribution to the floating population of rural-to- urban migrants, the labor-related migration of unmarried women, and the impact of this migration for domestic stability and international security.
• Potential Economic and Social Impacts of Rapid Higher Education Expansion in the World's Largest Developing Economies. Martin Carnoy, education; Amos Nur, geophysics; and Krishna Saraswat, electrical engineering. The development of higher education systems in Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC) will have a major impact on their ability to transition to large, developed, knowledge-based economies. Is the way nation states expand and reform higher education in response to global pressures an important indicator of societal capacity to achieve sustained economic growth? This project will examine differing approaches of BRIC governments to higher-education growth and reform, and ask whether these reflect differing levels of state capacity to expand the knowledge base for economic and social development and whether differing approaches result in significant changes in formation of analytical skills in university graduates, particularly scientists and engineers.
• Health Care for One Billion: Experimenting with Incentives for the Supply of Health Care in Rural China. Scott Atlas, radiology; Scott Rozelle, the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, FSI. This project examines the effects of existing health policies and institutions in rural areas of China - including rural health insurance, privatization of rural clinics, and investment in township hospitals - and introduces a new experiment to study and realign incentives to address a serious flaw in China's health care system, the practice in which doctors both prescribe and derive significant profits from drugs.

Two planning grants were also awarded, as follows:

• Stanford International Health and Society Initiative: Proposal to Plan for an Initial Program in the Indian Subcontinent. Vinod K. Bhutani, pediatrics; Nihar Nayak, obstetrics and gynecology. This project seeks to improve unacceptably high maternal and childhood morbidity and mortality rates in the Indian subcontinent by devising innovative strategies to bridge existing social and access barriers in the micro- and macro- health environment. Includes leadership training and cooperative work on practice and policy strategies with experts from Stanford and the subcontinent.
• Psychosocial Treatment of Children Orphaned by the Asian Tsunami in Indonesia. Hugh Solvason, psychiatry; Donald Barr, sociology. This project's goal is to develop and implement changes to reduce the sense of dislocation, anxiety, and behavioral problems among tsunami orphans at the As-Syafi`iyah Orphanage in Jakarta. By arranging the children into more cohesive groups that can operate like "families" rather than their current state of random associations typically found in orphanages, the project will create a new and ordered social system. In addition, Solvason and Barr plan to develop a system of counseling interventions for the most severely symptomatic children (supervised by Stanford Psychiatry faculty). Translated measures of depression, anxiety, and PTSD will be used to assess the success of the intervention.

The projects will produce new field research, conferences, research papers, books, symposia, and courses for Stanford students.

A third round of project awards will be made in February 2008. A formal request for proposals will be issued in the fall of 2007, with proposals due by December 14, 2007. Priority is given to teams of faculty who do not typically work together, represent multiple disciplines, and address issues that fall broadly within the three primary research areas of the International Initiative. Projects are to be based on collaborative research and teaching involving faculty from two or more disciplines, and where possible, from two or more of Stanford's seven schools.

For additional information, contact Catharine Kristian, ckristian@stanford.edu.