Ziad Obermeyer is the Blue Cross of California Distinguished Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, where he does research at the intersection of machine learning, medicine, and health policy. Prior to his career in medicine, he worked as a consultant to pharmaceutical and global health clients at McKinsey & Co. in New Jersey, Geneva, and Tokyo.

About the event: Multiple large bodies of scholarship engage with questions directly concerned with political violence, social unrest, and human rights abuses. Yet, efforts to collect data on these variables are fraught with challenges, and many extant empirical findings rely on data (particularly news report based events) suspected of or known to be biased in aggregate. We explore the use of anonymous, online surveying to detect otherwise unobserved activity. We run anonymous, online surveys in Bangladesh and Pakistan in the run up to, during and in the period following recent contentious 2024 elections in both countries and, separately, in the immediate aftermath of Bangladesh’s 2024 Students–People’s Uprising and expulsion of then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. To assess the efficacy of the surveys, we partnered with professional journalists working on both countries to verify the authenticity of reported incidents. Results confirm their effectiveness in uncovering many instances of political violence, social unrest, and human rights abuses otherwise likely to be missed/excluded from major news media reporting and ultimately major datasets derived from it. Yet, they also suggest that anonymous online survey responses and leading event datasets effectively complement, rather than substitute for, one another. Such surveys can be deployed rapidly to communicate with some of the most difficult to reach populations globally about the most sensitive political issues of interest to social scientists and policy professionals.

About the speaker: Andrew Shaver is an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Merced. Prior to that, he completed postdoctoral research fellowships at Stanford University's Political Science Department and, separately, at Dartmouth College. Professor Shaver earned his PhD in Public Affairs (security studies) from Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs and is the founding director of the Political Violence Lab. His research focuses on the causes, consequences, and detection and measurement of political violence and social unrest globally. His work appears in the American Political Science Review, American Economic Review, Annual Review of Sociology, and Journal of Politics, amongst other outlets. Professor Shaver previously served in different foreign affairs/national security positions within the U.S. Government.

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Amitabh is a Professor of Public Policy and Director of Health Policy Research at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. His research focuses on innovation, pricing, and capital allocation in the biopharmaceutical industry, value in health care, medical malpractice, racial disparities in healthcare, and discovering new methods for treading Alzheimer's. He serves on the Congressional Budget Office's Panel of Health Advisors. 

Adam is an economist at UC Berkeley who studies consumer behavior in health insurance, retirement saving, and other social insurance programs. His research focuses on generating policy insights that improve economic security and welfare. 

About the event: For years, development agencies have expanded, perceived as complements to national security with support for their autonomous administration. Today, however, issues of humanitarian aid and development are seen as increasingly linked to concerns about national security and politics, while aid skepticism is growing. The fruits of this shift were made all too clear when, in July 2025, the United States under the second Donald Trump administration merged its Agency for International Development (USAID) into its Department of State, echoing a similar move unfolding in other western donor countries. The merger in the U.S. solidified a global trend following similar mergers in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Norway, Denmark and New Zealand. Indeed, around the world over the past thirty years, many of the world’s wealthiest countries have merged their aid and diplomacy agencies.  Although mergers are trending, are they helping countries advance their security goals? While the U.S. merger is still unfolding with many of its results yet-to-be seen, other global merger experiences offer stories that collectively indicate lessons to be learned about the rising trend to merge development and diplomacy. This presentation presents research from a review of the twenty-year history of global affairs mergers, drawing on interviews with leaders, civil servants, and activists from around the world. Considering rising Chinese development investments, ongoing fallout from COVID-19, crises in Syria, Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine, climate change, and other global challenges, can development and diplomacy truly be integrated, or do these fields require distinction for their effective delivery? How might the U.S. consider the evidence from other aid-diplomacy mergers to inform its efforts to reform global affairs administration to address connected security and development challenges? This research explores the effects of recent mergers of aid and foreign policy agencies in the context of evolving global challenges and discusses the implications for foreign policy agendas moving forward.

About the speaker: Rachel A. George, PhD is a Lecturer in International Relations at Stanford University. She is also a Research Project Lead with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a Research Fellow at Georgetown’s Institute for Women, Peace, and Security. Previously, she served as Lecturing Fellow at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy and Visiting Assistant Professor at Duke Kunshan University. She was also Director for Education Content at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Research Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) in London.

Her work focuses on foreign policy, democracy, Middle East politics, international law, women, peace, and security, AI and other emerging technologies, and the connections between development and international security. Her research has been published in a range of outlets, including in Foreign Policy, Just Security, The Washington Quarterly, World Politics Review, The National Interest, CFR.org, Human Rights Review, and as chapters in The Arab Gulf States and the West: Perception and Misperception, Opportunities and Perils, and The Routledge History of Human Rights. She has also served as a contributor for BBC News, CNN and Arise America TV News. She has worked on projects with the UN Counter Terrorism Executive Directorate, Transparency International, The World Bank, Global Affairs Canada, Swedish International Development Agency, UN Development Program, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Packard Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among others.

She holds a BA in Politics from Princeton University, an MA in Middle East Studies from Harvard University, and PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: The Untold Story of China’s Nuclear Weapon Development and Testing offers the most comprehensive account of China’s nuclear weapons development from 1955 to 1996. Hui Zhang examines the purpose and technical specifics of each nuclear test and provides new details about China’s pursuit of warhead miniaturization. Based on a number of new Chinese-language sources that have not previously been analyzed, this book reveals that China has the ability to produce smaller, lighter warheads than some have suggested, as well as more options for missiles that could carry a larger number of warheads.

The book also provides a new framework for understanding China’s efforts to modernize its nuclear arsenal and offers clues about the future of China’s nuclear program. As the international community watches China’s rapid nuclear expansion with concern—and, in particular, as the United States considers whether it will be confronting two peer nuclear-armed adversaries (Russia and China) in the future—this book is a significant contribution to the policy debate over a potential new three-way nuclear arms race.

About the speaker: Hui Zhang is a Senior Research Associate at the Project on Managing the Atom in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Hui Zhang is leading a research initiative on China's nuclear policies for the Project on Managing the Atom in the Kennedy School of Government. His research includes verification techniques of nuclear arms control, the control of fissile material, nuclear terrorism, China's nuclear policy, nuclear safeguards and non-proliferation, and policy of nuclear fuel cycle and reprocessing.

Before coming to the Kennedy School in September 1999, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, Princeton University from 1997-1999. Hui Zhang received his Ph.D. in nuclear physics in Beijing in 1996.

Dr. Zhang is the author of several technical reports and book chapters, and dozens of articles in academic journals and the print media including Science and Global Security, Arms Control Today, Bulletin of Atomic Scientist, Disarmament Diplomacy, Disarmament Forum, the Nonproliferation Review, The Washington Quarterly, Journal of Nuclear Materials Management, INESAP, and China Security. Dr. Zhang gives many oral presentations and talks in international conferences and organizations.

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About the event: At the end of the Cold War, donors sought to bolster environmental programs and exchanges to build confidence and trust among scientists and NGOs and to support civil society activity in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In the years after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the United States and European Union channeled financial resources to civil society organizations to empower local civil society actors, which were seen as essential for consolidating democracy in many Eastern European countries and with integration into the European Union. This project revisits efforts during the Cold War and its aftermath to assess the political and environmental impact of linking scientific and environmental efforts to political cooperation and democracy building. In doing so, the project examines the political and environmental impact of these programs along with what lessons can be drawn for current efforts to leverage the environment and natural resources as a tool for peacebuilding.

About the speaker: Erika Weinthal is John O. Blackburn Distinguished Professor of Environmental Policy at Duke University. She is Chair of the Environmental Social Systems Division in the Nicholas School of the Environment and a member of the Bass Society of Fellows. She was a prior Chair of Duke’s Academic Council. Weinthal is the President of the Environmental Peacebuilding Association and an associate editor of its journal, Environment and Security. In 2017, she received the Women Peacebuilders for Water Award under the auspices of “Fondazione Milano per Expo 2015.”  Her most recent book is The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Politics (2023).

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: Communal disputes over local issues such as land use, cattle herding, and access to scarce resources are a leading cause of conflict across the world. In the coming decades, climate change, forced migration, and violent extremism will exacerbate such disputes in places that are ill equipped to handle them. Local Peace, International Builders examines the conditions under which international interventions mitigate communal violence. The book argues that civilian perceptions of impartiality, driven primarily by the legacies of colonialism, shape interveners’ ability to manage local disputes. Drawing on georeferenced data on the deployment of over 100,000 UN peacekeepers to fragile settings in the twenty-first century as well as a multimethod study of intervention in Mali – where widespread violence is managed by the international community – this book highlights a critical pathway through which interventions can maintain order in the international system.

About the speaker: William G. Nomikos is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he directs the Data-driven Analysis of Peace Project (DAPP) lab. His research looks at how domestic political considerations shape the conduct of international interventions in fragile settings. His first book, Local Peace, International Builders: How the UN Builds Peace from the Bottom Up, examines the conditions under which international actors successfully bring order, peace, and stability to fragile settings. His follow up work on this subject examines what peacekeepers can do to mitigate climate change-induced social conflict in weakly institutionalized settings.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.