Sonja Schmid is an assistant professor in the Department of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech. She received her PhD in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University in 2005. From 2005-2007 she was a fellow at CISAC and a lecturer in Stanford’s program in Science, Technology and Society. In 2007-08, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

Her research has focused on understanding complex decision-making processes at the interface between science, technology, and the state in the Cold War Soviet context, and she is currently working on a book about reactor design choices and the development of the civilian nuclear industry in the Soviet Union. The book is based on extensive archival research and narrative interviews with nuclear energy specialists in Russia. Her research interests also include technology transfer, risk communication, especially in the context of energy policy, and the popularization of science and technology.

Speaker Bio:

Greg Distelhorst is a Ph.D. candidate in the MIT Department of Political Science and a predoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. His dissertation addresses public accountability under authoritarian rule, focusing on official responsiveness and citizen activism in contemporary China. This work shows how citizens can marshal negative media coverage to discipline unelected officials, or "publicity-driven accountability." These findings result from two years of fieldwork in mainland China, including a survey experiment on tax and regulatory officials. A forthcoming second study measures the effects of citizen ethnic identity on government responsiveness in a national field experiment. His dissertation research has been funded by the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Boren Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation. A second area of research is labor governance under globalization, where he has examined private initiatives to improve working conditions in the global garment, toy, and electronics supply chains.

For more on Greg's research, please visit:

http://web.mit.edu/polisci/people/gradstudents/greg-distelhorst.html

Forecasting is a difficult profession. International economist David Hale and writer Lyric Hughes Hale do not claim they can foretell the future. But as veteran observers of the Asian economies, they can envision scenarios that are contrary to current conventional wisdom, and trends that deserve more attention than they are given in the media. What if China and Japan actually engage in armed conflict? Could East Asia experience its own version of the Arab Spring? What would be the consequences of another major earthquake in Japan? When the United States was the dominant power in the Pacific, security interests and economic interests were aligned in the region. Now that China has become the largest trading partner for many ASEAN countries, a new Great Divergence is emerging, with  potentially destabilizing consequences. While our national attention has been dominated by the Middle East for a decade now, in the coming era of energy self-sufficiency in the United States, we must shift our focus to the Far East.

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