Dr. Connell will give an overview of radiological terrorism, focused on high activity radiation sources in the US and the risk they pose for malevolent use. He has been involved in developing countermeasures to radiological terrorism and will discuss some of the current efforts by the US to reduce this risk. The main thrust of his talk will be about how the risks can be managed.

Dr. Connell is a Senior Scientist with the Systems Analysis Group at Sandia National Laboratories. He is a technical advisor on unconventional nuclear warfare, and radiological/nuclear terrorism to DOE, DHS, and the DOD. He has served as a subject matter expert on a number of Defense Science Board Studies dealing with unconventional nuclear warfare and radiological terrorism. In 2004, Dr. Connell worked with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to help identify and locate high risk radiation sources in Iraq and also served in Baghdad as a member of the Iraq Survey Group, Nuclear Team. He has published several reports on the risk of radiological terrorism and the vulnerability of cesium chloride irradiators. He was a committee member on the 2008 National Academy of Sciences Committee on Radiation Source Use and Replacement. Prior to working at Sandia National Laboratories, Dr. Connell was a Naval Officer and taught nuclear propulsion theory at the Naval Nuclear Power School in Orlando Florida. He has a B.S. with High Honor in Mechanical Engineering from Michigan Technological University and a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of New Mexico.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, the success of antibiotics and vaccines in controlling or eradicating infectious diseases (ID) worldwide resulted in decreased emphasis on development of ID therapeutics. The emergence in the past three decades of HIV, SARS, West Nile, avian flu, swine flu, Ebola, and the potential for bioterrorist attacks has reversed this trend and renewed interest in treatment and prophylaxis of ID. Unfortunately, because many diseases are prevalent primarily in developing nations (e.g., malaria, TB, Chagas), potential sales of bioterrorist pathogens are limited mainly to orders for government stockpiles (e.g., anthrax, smallpox, botulinum toxin), and the cost of anti-infective clinical trials is high, traditional large pharmaceutical companies have cut back R&D resources in this arena. To combat this investment shortfall, a new paradigm has emerged where public-private partnerships between the NIH, World Health Organization, private foundations, academia, and non-profits, are beginning to function like pharmaceutical companies to advance the development of promising ID drugs, even when there is little opportunity for profit. This talk will discuss the growing need for ID therapeutics, present some new models for discovering and developing them, and provide examples of public-private partnerships that have advanced therapeutics for specific infectious diseases.

About the speaker: Dr. Jon C. Mirsalis is Managing Director of the Biosciences Division and Executive Director of Preclinical Development at SRI International in Menlo Park, CA. Dr. Mirsalis is an internationally recognized expert in the development of drugs for infectious diseases. He manages two large programs for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for the development of promising therapeutics for the prevention and treatment of a broad range of infectious diseases including TB, malaria, influenza, polio, anthrax, plague, and Ebola. He has personally been involved in the development of over 50 therapeutics that have entered clinical trials and several have already reached the market. Before joining SRI in 1981, Dr. Mirsalis was a postdoctoral fellow at the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology, where he developed the in vivo-in vitro hepatocyte DNA repair assay, which is now widely used as a screen for potential carcinogens by government and industry. He is the author of over 140 publications and abstracts. Dr. Mirsalis received his B.S. degree in zoology/molecular biology from Kent State University, his M.S. degree in genetics from North Carolina State University, and holds Ph.D. degrees in toxicology and genetics from North Carolina State University. Dr. Mirsalis has an adjunct faculty appointment with the University of California-Santa Cruz, where he lectures regularly on genetic toxicology and carcinogenesis. He has recently served on the Board of Scientific Councilors for the National Toxicology Program, the Advisory Board for the Critical Path Institute, and is a past member of the FDA’s Over-the-Country Product Review Committee. Dr. Mirsalis has been certified by the American Board of Toxicology since 1983.

---Note: This event is co-sponsored by the Stanford Department of History---

The scope of official secrecy is rapidly expanding. The sheer scale of the national security state, the growth of electronic media, and the power that still comes from compartmentalizing information means that the government is only releasing a tenth as many pages of classified information as it produces. Hundreds of millions of secret documents are piling up, raising doubts about how we will be able to reconstruct the past and ensure government accountability. But historians are now teaming up with data scientists to analyze the millions of documents that are being released. Since these were among the first official documents produced and stored on computers, we can use techniques like natural language processing and machine-learning. It may now be possible to make out the broad patterns of official secrecy, attribute authorship to anonymous documents, and perhaps even predict the content of redacted text. But the political and ethical questions remain: what does the public need to know, and when do they need to know it?

About the speaker: Matthew Connelly is professor of history at Columbia University. His publications include A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (2002), and Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (2008). He has written research articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History, The International Journal of Middle East Studies, The American Historical Review, The Review francaise d'histoire d'Outre-mer, and Past & Present. He has also published commentary on international affairs in The Atlantic Monthly, The Wilson Quarterly, and The National Interest. He directs the University Seminar on Big Data and Digital Scholarship, the dual masters program with the LSE in International and World History, and the Hertog Global Strategy Initiative, a research program on the history and future of planetary threats. He received his B.A. from Columbia (1990) and his Ph.D. from Yale (1998).

Grant Miller will discuss the results of his SAPARC-funded research in rural China, supplementing a large NIH-funded project about pay-for-performance to improve health. The research was designed to test the effect of offering school principals small incentives for anemia reduction on the health and academic performance of primary school students – potentially leading to substantially more cost-effective health policies.

Grant Miller, PHD, MPP, is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine, a Core Faculty Member at the Center for Health Policy/Primary Care and Outcomes Research, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He is also a Faculty Fellow of the Stanford Center for International Development and a Faculty Affiliate of the Stanford Center for Latin American Studies. His primary areas of interest are health and development economics and economic demography.

Miller's current research focuses broadly on behavioral obstacles to health improvement in developing countries. One line of studies investigates household decision-making underlying puzzlingly low adoption rates of highly efficacious health technologies (like point-of-use drinking water disinfectants and improved cookstoves) in many poor countries. Another vein of research investigates misaligned macro- and micro-level incentives governing the supply of health technologies and services. He has conducted these and other research projects at institutions including the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Urban Institute, and the University of California-San Francisco's Institute for Health Policy Studies. He received a BA in psychology from Yale College, a master's degree in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and a PhD in health policy/economics also from Harvard.

Adopting a child, as an alternative to bearing a child, is a widely accepted means of creating a family in America today. By contrast, it is surprisingly uncommon for married couples in Japan to adopt an infant and raise the child “as their own.” In my estimates, the rate of unrelated child adoption per 10,000 births in recent years was about 170 in the U.S. and 6 in Japan. In this study, I use a framework of family economics to examine the evolution of child adoption in the U.S. and Japan from 1950 to 2010. I compile historical statistics to compare the trends in child adoption and explore demand-side, supply-side, and institutional factors underlying the observed trends. I find that, in the U.S., there has been an “excess demand” for adoptable infants throughout the postwar period and thus the trends were essentially driven by the availability of infants relinquished for adoption. Due to large supply shocks, the composition of child adoption in the U.S. has changed greatly from domestic infant adoption to the adoption of foreign infants and foster-care children since the 1970s. It is much harder to explain the adoption trends in Japan, however, which exhibit a persistent and continuous decline over the last five decades. Taking advantage of the major legal reform that took place in 1988, I test a demand-side theory of child adoption and examine what motivated parents to adopt children in Japan. Finally, I discuss a role of child adoption in improving children’s welfare.

Chiaki Moriguchi is a professor at the Institute of Economic Research of Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo. She received a BA from Kyoto University, an MA from Osaka University, and a PhD from Stanford University, all in economics. She was an assistant professor at Harvard Business School and Northwestern University and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, prior to joining Hitotsubashi University in 2009. Her main research fields are comparative economic history, comparative institutional analysis, and the economics of family. She has worked on the comparative historical analysis of employment systems, income inequality, and family formation in Japan and the U.S. Her research has appeared in Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Economic History, and Industrial and Labor Relations Review. She is a recipient of the 2011 Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Prize.  

Roundtable on Democracy Promotion

Future Directions for Canadian Democracy Promotion

Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law

Stanford University

16 April 2013

Agenda

9:00-9:45 Introductions

Purpose of roundtable and introduction of participants: Larry Diamond and Chris MacLennanOverview presentation on Canada’s experience with democracy promotion since the 1990s: Chris MacLennan

9:45-11:00 Democratization – Latest thinking on democracy, democratization and governance

Key Questions: What is the most recent thinking on democratization – how and why do democratic transitions happen; why do democracies fail; and, why do authoritarian regimes survive and thrive? What is the relationship between good governance and democracy?Lead Discussant: (TBC) to introduce session and offer initial thoughts on current state of democratization scholarship (5-10 minutes).

11:00:11:15 Break

11:15-12:30 Democracy Assistance – What donors can and should be doing to aid democratic transitions

Key Questions: What are the most effective ways to advance democracy through the use of international development assistance (types of programs / instruments, choice of countries, etc.)? Is a focus on governance capacity building enough or are the more political aspects of democracy building necessary?Lead Discussants: Richard Youngs (TBC) (European approaches) and David Yang (TBC) (US approaches) to introduce session and offer initial thoughts from their respective viewpoints (5-10 minutes each).

12:30-1:30 Lunch

1:30-3:30 Canada – Future Directions for Canadian Democracy Promotion

Potential Roles (1:30-2:30)

Key Questions: Is there a particular approach that Canada should take to support democratic development internationally? Should Canada pursue a broad-based approach to democracy promotion (like the US and EU) as it has in the past or should it focus on a specific role or niche internationally? Should Canada adopt a geographic focus (Americas, commonwealth countries, Francophonie) or something targeted to specific democratic challenges (fragile democracies, fragile states, transitioning states)? Is a more political approach required or can Canada maintain a more developmental approach to advancing democracy?Lead Discussant: Robert Miller (TBC) to introduce question and offer initial thoughts (5-10 minutes).

Institutions (2:30-3:30)

Key Questions: What type of institutional arrangements should Canada adopt to undertake democracy promotion? Does Canada need an independent body to advance the more “political” aspects of democracy assistance (e.g., political parties, elections, support to NGOs)? Is a special program needed either focused on democracy assistance or tying development to democracy performance (MCC)?Lead Discussant: Les Campbell (TBC) to introduce question and offer initial thoughts (5-10 minutes).

3:30-4:00 Conclusions and Next Steps

Final Thoughts: AllNext Steps: Chris MacLennan

About the topic: When in late 2009, President Obama ordered the surge of an additional 30,000 troops into Afghanistan to reverse Taliban momentum, major tenets of the U.S. military counterinsurgency doctrine shaped the resulting campaign plan.  Adages such as "protect the population" and "clear, hold, and build" served to guide civil-military actions.  With the hindsight of four years, however, it seems clear that some of the important assumptions upon which the plan was premised were significantly flawed.  Karl Eikenberry, who served in both senior diplomatic and military posts in Afghanistan, will examine the logic of counterinsurgency doctrine as it was applied during the surge and discuss its strengths and shortcomings.

About the speaker: Karl Eikenberry served as the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from May 2009 until July 2011, where he led the civilian surge directed by President Obama to reverse insurgent momentum and set the conditions for transition to full Afghan sovereignty. Before appointment as Chief of Mission in Kabul, Ambassador Eikenberry had a thirty-five year career in the United States Army, retiring in April 2009 with the rank of Lieutenant General.  He has served in various policy and political-military positions, including Deputy Chairman of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Military Committee in Brussels, Belgium; Director for Strategic Planning and Policy for U.S. Pacific Command at Camp Smith, Hawaii; U.S. Security Coordinator and Chief of the Office of Military Cooperation in Kabul, Afghanistan; Assistant Army and later Defense Attaché at the United States Embassy in Beijing, China; Senior Country Director for China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mongolia in the Office of the Secretary of Defense; and Deputy Director for Strategy, Plans, and Policy on the Army Staff.