Rajiv Chandrasekaran was an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post. From April 2003 to October 2004; he was The Post's bureau chief in Baghdad, where he was responsible for covering the American occupation of Iraq, leading a team of American correspondents, and supervising more than two dozen Iraqi staffers. He also spent much of the six months leading up to the war in Baghdad, reporting on the United Nations weapons-inspections process and the build-up to the conflict. Mr. Chandrasekaran will discuss American policy and decision-making in the "green zone," which is the subject of his new book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone.

He currently heads The Post's Continuous News department, which provides breaking news stories to the paper's Web site, washingtonpost.com. He has appeared on National Public Radio and numerous television programs and stations, including the News Hour, CNN, Fox News, Nightline, NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, and the BBC.

Christopher Blattman is currently completing a PhD in economics at UC Berkeley and holds a master's degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of conflict and violence, the organization of guerrilla groups, as well as what post-conflict development policies work, for whom, and why. He recently completed a survey of war-affected men and boys in northern Uganda, and is presently conducting a similar survey of women and girls. Two randomized evaluations of post-conflict programs are planned in the same region for 2007, one studying the role of a group-based economic intervention in promoting community reintegration of ex-combatants, and another studying the introduction of a government and an independent press into communities not currently served by newspapers.

James Fearon is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, a professor of political science and CISAC affiliated faculty member at Stanford University. His research has focused on democracy and international disputes, explanations for interstate wars, and, most recently, the causes of civil and especially ethnic violence. He is presently working on a book manuscript (with David Laitin) on civil war since 1945. Representative publications include "Neotrusteeship and the Problem of Weak States" (International Security, Spring 2004), "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War" (APSR, February 2003), and "Rationalist Explanations for War" (International Organization, Summer 1995). Fearon won the 1999 Karl Deutsch Award, which is "presented annually to a scholar under the age of forty, or within ten years of the acquisition of his or her doctoral degree, who is judged to have made, through a body publications, the most significant contribution to the study of international relations and peace research." He was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences in 2002.

Dara Kay Cohen is a PhD candidate in political science at Stanford University and was a fellow and research assistant at CISAC in 2004-2005 and 2005-2006. Her research at CISAC involved studying the politics of national security; she examined the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, how security issues have affected congressional elections and co-wrote a paper with Jacob N. Shapiro on the failure of the homeland security alert system. Her current dissertation research focuses on the use of sexual violence during civil wars, and she spend last summer in Sierra Leone conducting initial field work. She previously worked at the Department of Justice as a paralegal in the Outstanding Scholars Program in the Counterterrorism Section and at the u.S. Embassy in London on terrorist financing issues. She received her a.B. in political science and philosophy with honors from Brown University in 2001.

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, with a PhD in political science from Stanford as well as a law degree from Yale, focuses his scholarship on how organizations cope with the legal responsibility for managing complex criminal justice, regulatory, and international security problems. He has published the leading academic paper on the operation of federal money laundering laws, and one of the most exhaustive empirical case studies of public participation in regulatory rulemaking proceedings. Recent projects address the role of criminal enforcement in managing transnational threats, the physical safety of refugee communities in the developing world, legislative and budgetary dynamics affecting the federal Department of Homeland Security, and the impact of bureaucratic structure on how institutions implement legal mandates. Professor Cuéllar is an affiliated faculty member at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation, and a member of the Executive committee for the Stanford International Initiative. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2001, he served as senior advisor to the u.S. Treasury Department's Undersecretary for Enforcement and clerked for Chief Judge Mary M. Schroeder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Bary R. Weingast is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution as well as the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University; he served as chair of that department from 1996 to 2001. He is also a professor of economics, by courtesy, at the university. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences from 1993 to 1994. Weingast is an expert in political economy and public policy, the political foundation of markets and economic reform, U.S. politics, and regulation. His current research focuses on the political determinants of public policymaking and the political foundations of markets and democracy. Weingast is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the 2006 recipient of the William H. Riker Prize in Political Science. He received the Heinz Eulau Award for Best paper from the American Political Science Review in 1987. With Charles Stewart, he received the Award for Best Paper n Political History b the American Political Science Association in 1994 and again in 1998. He is also the recipient, along with Kenneth Schultz, of the Franklin L. Burdette Award for Best paper Presented at the 1994 Political Science Association Meeting.

Paul Stockton is a senior research scholar at CISAC. He was formerly the associate provost at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and was the former director of its Center for Homeland Defense and Security. His teaching and research focus son how U.S. security institutions respond to changes in the threat (including the rise of terrorism), and the interaction of Congress and the Executive branch in restructuring national security budgets, policies and institutional arrangement.s Stockton joined the faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School in August 1990. From 1995 until 2000, he served as director of NPS's Center for Civil-Military Relations. From 2000-2001, he founded and served as the acting dean of NPS's School of International Graduate Studies. He was appointed associate provost in 2001.

Ambassador James E. Goodby is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a research affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has held several senior government positions dedicated to arms control and nonproliferation, including deputy to the special adviser to the president and secretary of state on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), 2000-2001; special representative of President Clinton for the security and dismantlement of nuclear weapons, 1995-1996; chief negotiator for nuclear threat reduction agreements, 1993-1994, and vice chair of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty talks, 1982-1983. He served as U.S. ambassador to Finland in 1980-1981.

Bart Bernstein is a Professor of American history at Stanford University. He has written very widely on post-World War II American history, including the surrender of Japan at the end of World War II, economic policy, diplomacy, nuclear history, and scientific discovery.

The Center for Science, Technology and Security Policy at the American Association for the Advancement of Science has assembled a panel of experts to examine the technical aspects of the Reliable Replacement Warhead program. The speaker will discuss the preliminary findings of this panel.

Benn Tannenbaum is Project Director at the Center for Science, Technology and Security Policy. Tannenbaum works on a variety of projects for CSTSP, including drafting policy briefs, tracking legislation, serving as liaison with MacArthur-funded centers and the security policy community, organizing workshops and other meetings, attending Congressional hearings and conducting topical research. He testified before the House Homeland Security Committee on radiation portal monitors. Tannenbaum also serves on the American Physical Society's Panel on Public Affairs and on the Program Committee for the Forum on Physics and Society. Prior to joining AAAS, Tannenbaum worked as a senior research analyst for the Federation of American Scientists. He worked extensively on the FAS paper "Flying Blind"; this paper explores ways to increase the quality and consistency of science advising to the federal government. Before joining FAS, Tannenbaum served as the 2002-2003 American Physical Society Congressional Science Fellow. During his fellowship, Tannenbaum worked for Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-MA) on nonproliferation issues. Before his fellowship, Tannenbaum worked as a postdoctoral rellow at the University of California, Los Angeles. At UCLA, he was involved in the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Collider Detector Facility at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago. He received his PhD in particle physics from the University of New Mexico in 1997. His dissertation involved a search for evidence of supersymmetry. None was found.

A key pillar and unmet need in the defense against threats to health is the ability to recognize the etiological factor(s) and predict the course of disease, at early points in the timeline of the process. This ability would enable early intervention in the disease process when there is the greatest likelihood of benefit, as well as triaging of hosts, based on individual need. Genomic tools and approaches have enabled a more detailed description of host-microbe encounters, and shed light on fundamentally important processes, including the cellular responses associated with infection. Genome-wide transcript-abundance profiles, like other comprehensive molecular readouts of host physiological state, provide a detailed blueprint of the host-pathogen dialogue during microbial disease. Studies of cancer based on genome-wide transcript-abundance profiles have led to novel signatures that predict disease outcome and serve as useful clinical classifiers. The highly dynamic and compartmentalized aspects of the host response to pathogens complicate efforts to identify predictive signatures for infectious diseases. Yet, studies of systemic infectious diseases so far suggest the possibility of successfully discriminating between different types (classes) of infection and predicting clinical outcome. In addition, host gene expression analysis could lead to the identification of early signatures associated with a protective immune response, both to natural infection and to vaccination. Early explorations in some of these areas indicate the potential feasibility of this approach but also point to important unmet challenges.

David Relman is associate professor of medicine, and of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University. He is also chief, infectious diseases section, at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System in Palo Alto, California.

A native of Boston, Massachusetts, Relman holds an SB degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his MD degree, magna cum laude, from Harvard Medical School in 1982. Following postdoctoral clinical training at Massachusetts General Hospital in internal medicine and in infectious diseases, Relman served as a postdoctoral research fellow in microbiology at Stanford University in the laboratory of Stanley Falkow from 1986 until 1992. He joined the Stanford University faculty in 1992 and was appointed associate professor (with tenure) in 2001. His research is directed towards the characterization of the human indigenous microbial communities of the mouth and gut, with emphasis on understanding variation in diversity, succession, the effects of disturbance, and the role of these communities in oral and intestinal disease.

Experimental approaches include molecular phylogenetics, ecological statistics, single cell genomics, and community-wide metagenomics. A second area of research concerns the classification structure of humans and non-human primates with systemic infectious diseases, based on patterns of genome-wide gene transcript abundance in blood and other tissues. The goals of this work are to recognize classes of pathogen and predict clinical outcome at early time points in the disease process, as well as gain further insights into virulence (e.g., of variola and monkeypox viruses). Past achievements include the description of a novel approach for identifying previously-unknown pathogens (selected as one of the 50 most important papers of the last century by the American Society for Microbiology), the identification of a number of new human microbial pathogens, including the agent of Whipple's disease, and the most extensive descriptions to date of the human indigenous microbial community. See http://relman.stanford.edu. Relman received the Squibb Award from the Infectious Diseases Society of America (2001), the Senior Scholar Award in Global Infectious Diseases from the Ellison Medical Foundation (2002), and is a recipient of an NIH Director's Pioneer Award (2006). He is a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2003.

Relman currently serves on the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research and was a member of the Board of Directors of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (2003-2006), and co-chair of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Advances in Technology and the Prevention of Their Application to Next Generation Biowarfare (2004-2006). He is a member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, the Institute of Medicine's Forum on Microbial Threats, and advises several U.S. Government departments and agencies on matters related to microbial pathogen detection and future biological threats.

The prospect of civil nuclear cooperation between the United States and India has stirred controversy for its potential impact on nuclear proliferation. I will discuss the origins or the U.S.-India nuclear deal, its current political prospects in the United States and India, and evaluate its impact on the nonproliferation regime. My talk will be based on part on the report U.S.-India Nuclear Cooperation: A Strategy for Moving Forward.

Michael Levi is a fellow for science and technology at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He was previously a science and technology fellow at the Brookings Institution. Levi is the author of two books, The Future of Arms Control (Brookings, 2005, with Michael O'Hanlon), and Rethinking Nuclear Terrorism (Harvard University Press, forthcoming).

Satellites are absolutely essential and extremely vulnerable for national and economic security. How do we deal with this dilemma?

Michael Krepon is co-founder of the Henry L. Stimson Center and the author or editor of eleven books and over 350 articles. Prior to co-founding the Stimson Center, Krepon worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during the Carter administration, and in the U.S. House of Representatives, assisting Congressman Norm Dicks. He receive an MA from the School for Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and a BA from Franklin & Marshall College. He also studied Arabic at the American University in Cairo, Egypt.

Krepon divides his time between Stimson's South Asia and space security projects. The South Asia project concentrates on escalation control, nuclear risk reduction, confidence building, and peace making between India and Pakistan. This project entails field work, publications, and Washington-based programming, including a visiting fellowship program. The space security project seeks to promote a code of conduct for responsible space-faring nations and works toward stronger international norms for the peaceful uses of outer space.

Bioterrorism is a growing threat. While the U.S. government has spent considerable sums on programs designed to protect the United States from a biological attack, no clear strategy has been articulated to guide planning and expenditures. This talk will present the outlines of a coherent strategy for coping with bioterrorism that includes diplomacy, deterrence and defense, with the emphasis on defense.

Dean Wilkening directs the Science Program at CISAC. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University and spent 13 years at the RAND Corporation prior to coming to Stanford in 1996. His major research interests have been nuclear strategy and policy, arms control, the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, ballistic missile defense, and conventional force modernization. His most recent research focuses on ballistic missile defense and biological terrorism. His work on missile defense focuses on the broad strategic and political implications of deploying national and theater missile defenses, in particular, the impact of theater missile defense in Northeast Asia, and the technical feasibility of boost-phase interceptors for national and theater missile defense. His work on biological weapons focuses on understanding the scientific and technical uncertainties associated with predicting the outcome of hypothetical airborne biological weapon attacks, with the aim of devising more effective civil defenses, and a reanalysis of the accidental anthrax release in 1979 from a Russian military compound in Sverdlovsk with the aim of improving our understanding of the human effects of inhalation anthrax.