Heidi Kjærnet will be presenting her paper "Petroleum sector management in Azerbaijan: A case study of the national oil company SOCAR". The paper focuses on the interactions between the Azerbaijani government and the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan, SOCAR, and explores the complex interconnections between the government and its national oil company (NOC). In the post-Soviet period, SOCAR has played the role as the national partner in consortiums with international oil companies producing oil and gas fields in Azerbaijan, as well as having important policy tasks and social responsibilities.

The paper argues that there is a profound lack of separation of commercial and regulatory responsibility in the Azerbaijani petroleum sector. While Azerbaijan is certainly giving preferential treatment to SOCAR, Heidi argues Baku is less likely to follow the example of Kazakhstan in pursuing a resource nationalist line through curtailing the activities of international oil companies due to the Azerbaijani government's ambitions for regional leadership in the South Caucasus, and its strong commitment to cooperating with the international oil companies.

Heidi's research on SOCAR and Azerbaijan is a part of her PhD dissertation with the working title "Petroleum, politics and power: The National Oil Companies of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia".

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Heidi Kjærnet is a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) at Stanford University.  She is visiting from the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and the Fridtjof Nansen Institute where she is a Research Fellow.

She holds an MA in Russia and Post-Soviet Affairs from the University of Oslo. She has taken intensive Russian language courses at the Norwegian Center in St Petersburg and interned at the Royal Norwegian Embassy to Azerbaijan. Currently she is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Tromso.

Bekhzod Yuldashev is a CISAC Visiting Scholar. He served as a consultant-advisor at the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2006-2007. Prior to that, he was director-general of the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Uzbekistan Academy of Science from 1990 to 2006. From 1984 to 1990, he served as head of the laboratory in the Physical Technical Institute in Tashkent, where he had been a senior researcher since 1972.

Yuldashev has published about 300 scientific papers dedicated to various subjects of particle and nuclear physics in the wide range of primary energies. His experimental research has revealed or proven important concepts in nuclear energy, and he holds more than 20 patents on nuclear applications.

He is a full member of the Academy of Science of Uzbekistan and served as the academy's president from September 2000 through November 2005. In 2000-2004 he was elected a Member of Parliament of the Republic of Uzbekistan, and in 2004-2005 was elected a Senator.

He is a fellow of Islamic Academy of Sciences, a member of the American Physical Society. From 1992 to 2002, he was an elected member of the Scientific Council of the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research, in Dubna, Russia, one of two international nuclear centers in the world. He is also a member of the IAEA's Standing Advisory Group for Nuclear Applications, a fellow of the Islamic Countries Academy, and foreign member of the National Academy of Kazakhstan. He is an honorary professor of Samarkand State University and honorary doctor of the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research (2004). He won the 2004 Economic Cooperation Organization's excellence award in science and technology and the 1983 Uzbekistan State Prize for Science and Technology.

Yuldashev graduated from Tashkent and Moscow Universities in 1968. He earned his PhD in physics and mathematics from the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia, in 1971.

Abstract
Information is at the heart of human rights work, and the growing emphasis on evidence-based policymaking to support development and transition goals has changed the way human rights advocacy is constructed. As the human rights movement responds to new challenges, organizations monitoring and investigating human rights need the ability to understand and analyze large amounts of information easily. However, many organizations, large and small, lack both the systems and staff to manage their growing stores of information internally, and turn that well-structured information into powerful advocacy. In an age of rapid and pervasive information flows, human rights organizations are seeking to make their advocacy more resonant both for policymakers and for a broader public audience, and need the tools and skills to do so - but what is the appropriate technology, and how can a human rights organization turn that into a proposal for funding? The Information Program's Civil Society Communications Initiative and the Human Rights and Governance Grants Program (HRGGP) have jointly decided to address this ever-growing need in OSI's grantees and the human rights sector at large. This talk will discuss the new Human Rights Data Initiative at the Open Society Institute, our strategy over the coming years, and how donors can support the targeted, meaningful implementation of technology and data management in human rights organizations.

Elizabeth Eagen is the joint program officer at Open Society Institute in the Information Program and the Human Rights and Governance Grants Program. For HRGGP she covers Russia, Armenia, Georgia, and Kazakhstan, and is the point person for human rights and information. With the Information Program, she works with the Civil Society Communications Initiative on databases and information management for NGOs, with a global remit.

Prior to joining OSI, she completed a Fulbright in the Republic of Georgia, where she researched national identity's role in regulatory decisions for historical and archeological sites. She holds a Masters of Public Policy and a Masters of Eastern European Studies from the University of Michigan. She also holds an undergraduate degree from Macalester College in Russian and International Studies. From 2000-2002, she was an associate at Human Rights Watch's Europe and Central Asia Division.

Long-term demand for nuclear fuel is high as demonstrated by the continued rise in activities such as uranium mining and milling, enrichment, and fuel fabrication. At a recent international conference in Beijing on nuclear energy, IAEA officials stated that the global financial crisis is unlikely to deter the increasing long-term demand for new nuclear power plants. In order to limit the proliferation risk, the IAEA suggested the concept of multinational nuclear arrangements and member countries followed up with various related proposals. A few projects at the front-end of the nuclear fuel cycle are reviewed in the context of such multinational arrangements. Policies of two uranium-producing countries, Mongolia (a new supplier) and Kazakhstan (a relatively new supplier) are compared. The development at the front end of the nuclear fuel cycle is reviewed in the context of collaboration of supplier countries and countries with strong technological capability and demand such as Russia, France, China, Japan, and India. 

Undraa Agvaanluvsan is a visiting professor at CISAC. Her research covers the technical and policy aspects of the uranium and nuclear energy industry. Mongolia, her homeland, has a large reserve of natural uranium that it wants to develop for economic and strategic purposes. Similar to other developing nations, Mongolia also is considering nuclear power to help reduce domestic pollution and meet growing demand for electricity. In this context, Agvaanluvsan is analyzing Mongolia's uranium mining and processing policies to compare this emerging industry with parallel developments in Kazakhstan and countries in southern Africa. She also is comparing Mongolia's potential role as a uranium supplier to that of Canada's and Australia's.

Agvaanluvsan received her bachelor's (1994) and master's (1995) degrees in physics from the National University of Mongolia. From 1996-97, she studied high energy physics at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. Agvaanluvsan earned her doctorate in 2002 from North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, studying nuclear reactions and quantum chaos in nuclei. Following completion of her doctorate, she conducted postdoctoral research work in the Nuclear Experimental Physics group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

In addition to Agvannluvsan's scientific and policy analysis work, in 2008 she served as an adviser to Mongolia's Minister of Foreign Affairs. Agvaanluvsan also is director of the recently established Mongolian-American (MonAme) Scientific Research Center in Ulaanbaatar, which focuses on energy, the environment and mineral processing technologies. In September 2008, she helped organize MonAme's first international meeting, the "Ulaanbaatar Conference on Nuclear Physics and Applications," in Mongolia's capital.