Suicide bombings targeting Israeli civilians were once the favored tactic of Palestinian terrorists. Israeli deaths from suicide bombings peaked in the spring of 2002, but Israeli countermeasures dramatically lowered the number of successful suicide bombings since then. This talk will assess the impact of various countermeasures on suicide bombing rates with an eye towards understanding the decline in successful suicide bombings in Israel.

Edward H. Kaplan is the William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Management Sciences at the Yale School of Management, a professor of public health at the Yale School of Medicine, and professor of engineering in the Yale Faculty of Engineering. An elected member of the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine, Kaplan uses operations research and statistical methods to study problems in public policy and management. His earlier work was devoted to evaluating HIV prevention programs, while his more recent studies focus on counterterror topics such as the tactical prevention of suicide bombings and response logistics in the event of a bioterror attack. He has also dabbled in predicting the outcomes of presidential elections and NCAA basketball tournaments. His efforts have been recognized with several awards in the fields of operations research and public health.

Despite predictions of their eradication in the 1960s, infectious diseases remain a significant cause of global health, economic, and social problems. There has been a renewed focus on the background "matrix" of infections that occur around the globe, as well as on emerging, re-emerging, and deliberately emerging (i.e. bioterror) agents. This talk will provide a global health perspective on infectious diseases in 2007, and highlight the lessons that can be learned from three conditions (HIV/AIDS, influenza, and SARS).

Daniel Libraty is an associate professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He is a member of the Center for Infectious Disease and Vaccine Research (CIDVR), and the Division of Infectious Diseases/Department of Medicine. He received his MD degree from the University of California, San Diego. He completed his post-graduate residency in internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and obtained subspecialty training in infectious diseases at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on understanding the protective and pathogenic human immune responses to emerging and re-emerging viral diseases such as dengue, hantavirus, SARS, and influenza. He has lived and traveled extensively throughout Southeast Asia and other parts of the world in the course of working on these infectious diseases.

Executive Director of UNAIDS since its creation in 1995 and Under Secretary-General of the United Nations, Dr. Peter Piot comes from a distinguished academic and scientific career focusing on AIDS and women's health in the developing world.

Drawing on his skills as a scientist, manager, and activist, Dr. Piot has challenged world leaders to view AIDS in the context of social and economic development as well as security.

Under his leadership, UNAIDS has become the chief advocate of worldwide action against AIDS. It has brought together ten organizations of the United Nations system around a common agenda on AIDS, spearheading UN reform.

Dr. Piot earned a medical degree from the University of Ghent, a PhD in Microbiology from the University of Antwerp, Belgium and was a Senior Fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle. After graduating from medical school, Dr. Piot co-discovered the Ebola virus in Zaire in 1976.

In the 1980s, Dr. Piot launched and expanded a series of collaborative projects in Burundi, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zaire. Projet SIDA (Project AIDS) in Kinshasa, Zaire, was the first international project on AIDS in Africa and is widely acknowledged as having provided the foundations of our understanding of HIV infection in Africa. He was a professor of microbiology, and of public health at the Institute of Tropical Medicine, in Antwerp, and the Universities of Nairobi, Brussels, and Lausanne.

In 1992, Dr. Piot joined the Global Programme on AIDS of the World Health Organization, in Geneva, as Associate Director.

Born in 1949 in Belgium, Dr. Piot is fluent in three languages and is the author of 16 books and more than 500 scientific articles. He has received numerous awards for scientific and societal achievement, and was made a Baron by King Albert II of Belgium in 1995. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States and the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium, and is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London, UK.

For more information about Dr. Piot, read "The Life of a Virus Hunter" from Newsweek's special edition of May 15, 2006, AIDS at 25.

Dr. David Heymann is the Assistant Director-General for Communicable Diseases and Representative of the Director-General for Polio Eradication. From July 1998 until July 2003, he was Executive Director of the WHO Communicable Diseases Cluster. Dr. Heymann was Director of the WHO Programme on Emerging and other Communicable Diseases from October 1995 to July 1998, and prior to that was the Chief of research activities in the WHO Global Programme on AIDS. Before joining WHO, Dr. Heymann worked for thirteen years as a medical epidemiologist in sub-Saharan Africa on assignment from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He also worked for two years in India as a medical epidemiologist in the WHO Smallpox Eradication Programme.

Dr. Heymann holds a B.A. from the Pennsylvania State University, an M.D. from Wake Forest University, a Diploma in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and has completed practical epidemiology training in the two-year Epidemic Intelligence Service of CDC. In 2004, he received the American Public Health Association Award for Excellence and was named to the United States Institute of Medicine. In 2005, he was awarded a Welling Professorship at the George Washington University School of Public Health and the 2005 Donald Mackay medal by the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

The Symposium on Technology and Culture is open to the entire Stanford community, but is designed primarily for Stanford faculty to share their work with other faculty as a means of promoting collaborative interdisciplinary work on various aspects of the symposium's theme. "Technology" and "culture" are two of six global challenges and cross-cutting drivers that are the focus of the Stanford International Initiative.

8:00 - 8:30 AM Continental breakfast

8:30 - 10:00 AM Panel 1: Impact of Technology on Gender

10:15 - 11:45 AM Panel 2: Culture, Technological Change, and Development

11:45 - 12:30 PM Lunch (RSVP strongly suggested)

12:30 - 1:15 PM Keynote: David Kennedy

Does the United States Have a Mercenary Army?

How Technology Has Made it Too Easy to Go to War

1:30 - 2:45 PM Panel 3: Technology, Culture, and National Security

3:00 - 4:30 PM Panel 4: Health Technology Adoption

Impact of Technology on Gender

Richard Saller, Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, moderator

Denise Johnson, Associate Professor of Surgery

Clifford Nass, Professor of Communication

Christine Min Wotipka, Assistant Professor of Education

Culture, Technological Change, and Development

Jeremy Weinstein, Assistant Professor of Political Science, moderator

Avner Greif, The Bowman Family Endowed Professor in Humanities and Sciences

Jessica Riskin, Associate Professor of History

Romain Wacziarg, Associate Professor of Economics, GSB

Technology, Culture, and National Security

Scott Sagan, Professor of Political Science, moderator

David Kennedy, The Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History

Rebecca Slayton, Lecturer in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society

Health Technology Adoption

Grant Miller, Assistant Professor of Medicine, moderator

Lynn Hildemann, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Science

David Katzenstein, Professor (Research) of Medicine (Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine)

Aprajit Mahajan, Assistant Professor of Economics