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Speaker Bio: Dr. Constanze Stelzenmüller is the inaugural Robert Bosch Senior Fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. Prior to Brookings, she was a senior transatlantic fellow and Berlin office director with the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF). Her areas of expertise include transatlantic relations; German foreign policy; NATO; the European Union’s foreign, security and defense policy; international law; and human rights. Previously, she was a writer and editor at the German weekly DIE ZEIT (1994 to 2005). Dr. Stelzenmüller’s essays and articles have appeared in a wide range of publications, including Foreign Affairs, Internationale Politik, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, and Süddeutsche Zeitung. She is also a frequent commentator on American and European radio and television including Presseclub (ARD), National Public Radio, and the BBC.

Abstract: Judging by media headlines or the agenda of major security conferences, the main issues on the minds of policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic are 1) China and 2) Trump (or vice versa). Russia, it is safe to say, has receded to the back reaches of newspapers and our minds. But the Kremlin continues to engage in hybrid warfare in Europe and to wage a proxy war in Eastern Ukraine that has claimed 13.000 lives. It is gaining influence in other regions where the West is retreating, such as the Middle East and Latin America. How should Europe and America be working together to deal with this challenge—and what‘s stopping us?

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While Ephesos was inscribed in the UNESCO world heritage list in 2015, Vienna is in danger of losing the title because of building projects in the city center. From these two rather different examples, the whole UNESCO process including application, inscription, and monitoring will be critically reviewed and the question of accuracy, independency, and scrutiny of UNESCO and related organizations raised. National exertions of influence will be reflected upon, as they often contradict expert evaluations. In conclusion, the issue ought to be addressed whether something like “World Cultural Heritage,” in the sense of global responsibility, actually exists, and whether the national administration of the world heritage sites in fact excludes this aspiration. Ultimately the overriding question is raised as to how a consciousness for cultural heritage, apart from touristic-economic incentives and beyond national (in many cases regional) borders, can be created.

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Sabine Ladstätter studied Classical Archaeology, Prehistory, Protohistory and Ancient History at the Universities of Graz and Vienna, culminating in a Master's degree (University of Graz) in 1992 and a Doctoral degree at the University of Vienna in 1997. Between 1997-2007 she held the position of Research Assistant at the Institute for the Cultural History of Antiquity at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. After her Habilitation at the University of Vienna in 2007 she moved to the Austrian Institute of Archaeology, the directorship of which she assumed in 2009. At the same time, the directorship of the excavations at Ephesos was assigned to her. Awards for Scientist of the Year in 2011 in Austria, and for the best popular scientific book in Austria in 2014, are proof of her engagement in the areas of scientific communication and public outreach. She is a member of the German Archaeological Institute and of the Archaeological Institute of America, as well as numerous national and international scientific and editorial boards, and is a referee for leading research promotion institutions. Visiting professorships at the Ecole Normale Superieur de Paris (2016) and Stanford University (2019) underscore her engagement in the fields of education and teaching, also attested by her supervision of academic degrees at a variety of European universities.

Abstract: Materials used in key components of nuclear power reactors, such as the fuel cladding and the pressure vessel, provide shields for the release of highly radioactive isotopes generated in the nuclear fuel to the environment, thus their reliability is an important issue in the safety evaluation.  The accident that occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi in 2011 demonstrated that materials that are considered reliable during normal operating conditions will fail in an extreme accident condition. Subsequently, there has been an international effort on developing materials for Accident Tolerant Fuels (ATF). In addition, the development of new generation of nuclear reactors also calls for new materials that may withstand higher temperatures, higher radiation doses and with better performance under severe corrosive conditions.  This talk will outline the challenges and status for such developments using recent data from the authors’ own research group as examples.  Also, since China is building the most nuclear reactors now and “a nuclear accident anywhere of the world will be an accident of everywhere of the world”, the importance and challenges of collaborating with the Chinese in this area will be discussed. 

Bio: Dr. Lumin Wang is a professor of nuclear engineering, and materials science & engineering at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (UM). He came to the US from China in 1982, and received his MS and PhD degrees in Material Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1984 and 1988, respectively. He worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Argonne National Laboratory and a research scientist at the University of New Mexico before joining the faculty of UM in 1997.  His research has focused on the study of radiation effects of materials using ion beams and transmission electron microscopy. He served as the director of Electron Microbeam Analysis Laboratory, a campus-wide material characterization center at UM between 2005 and 2010. Dr. Wang has published more than 400 papers in research journals and delivered more than 100 invited talks internationally. He has been a member of the International Committee of the American Nuclear Society and an adjunct chair professor of Xiamen University of China since 2011. He has taken more than 100 UM students to China to observe the construction of nuclear reactors during the last 8 summers.