Kevin Volpp is the founding Director of the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics, Division Chief of Health Policy for the Department of Medical Ethics and Policy, and the Founders President’s Distinguished Professor of Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine and Health Care Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

His work focuses on developing and testing innovative ways of applying insights from behavioral economics in improving patient health behavior and affecting provider performance. He has competitively been awarded more than $60 million to lead projects with a variety of employers, insurers, health systems, and consumer companies in testing the impact of different behavioral economic strategies on behavior.

You can listen to one of his more recent podcasts here: How Behavioral Economics Could Solve America's Health Care Woes

Update (3/12/18): We are now at capacity. Thank you to those who submitted RSVPs.

Abstract: The Berkeley Applied Nuclear Physics Program leads developments of new concepts and technologies to address challenges in fundamental physics, medicine, nuclear security, and safety. Recent progress in radiation detection and imaging combined with advances in computer vision and data processing enable unprecedented capabilities in the detection, mapping, and visualization of radiological and nuclear materials in complex environments. We have developed a new concept called 3-D Scene Data Fusion, which fuses contextual and radiation data to produce 3-D maps of radioactive sources in real-time. We have deployed this capability in unmanned and manned configurations in different locations including evacuated communities and at the Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture. While these technologies are necessary to better respond to accidents now and in the future, we need to ensure that the data provided can be understood by all stakeholders, including communities exposed to the risk of detrimental effects. We have established the Berkeley Institute for Resilient Communities to address this need by combining research, education, and communities in an international, multi-disciplinary, and multi-cultural context. Important components of these activities are the Radwatch and DoseNet programs which provide the basis for our communications. As an example, DoseNet aims at establishing a sustainable multi-sensor high-school network enabling students across the world to learn important concepts in science and engineering and what is normal in our world.

Speaker bio: Dr. Kai Vetter is Professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley and Faculty Senior Scientist and Head of the Applied Nuclear Physics program at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His main research interests are in the development and demonstration of new concepts and technologies in radiation detection to address some of the outstanding challenges in fundamental sciences, nuclear security, and health.

Prof. Vetter is director of Institute for Resilient Communities that was established in 2015 to address the need to better integrate advancements in sciences and technologies with communities through education and outreach locally and globally. He initiated and still leads the Berkeley Radwatch and DoseNet activities with the goal to engage high and middle schools in performing environmental measurements employing fundamental science and engineering concepts and to expand across regions, nations, and cultures.

He has authored and co-authored about 200 publications in peer-reviewed journals and is fellow of the American Physical Society. He received Presidential Citations from the American Nuclear Society twice, for his engagement in Fukushima through measurements and enhancing community resilience.

Abstract: What are the consequences of the emergence of robotics, big data, and artificial intelligence for international politics? Are these new technologies going to promote instability and conflict, as many warn, or are they going to reinforce U.S. military primacy? In particular, will China be able to gain and eventually exploit the unfolding technological revolution - the so-called Second Machine age - or are such concerns exaggerated? The literature in political science and international relations theory has either largely neglected technology and technological innovation, or simply assumed that technology is a substitute for labor that reduces countries' constraints to go to war. Drawing from the scholarship in economics and management, in this article we look at technology in terms of a set complements and nodes-in-the-network. Thus, while technological innovation reduces the prices of some goods or tasks, it simultaneously makes their complementary assets more difficult to procure (through an increase in the demand). The resulting distributional effects, we argue, explain why actors will benefit unevenly from technological change. We test our theoretical insights by looking at seapower in the first and in the emerging second machine age: respectively, the time of the steam engine, steel hulls, quick-firing long-range guns and the telegraph; as well as the unfolding era of neural networks, fast processors and real-time communications. Our preliminary empirical results corroborate our framework, namely that the effects of technological change are much more complex than the literature acknowledges and highlights the challenges countries will have to face in the military realm during the second machine age.

Speaker bios: Andrea Gilli is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School of Harvard University and a former Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation of Stanford University. Andrea has conducted research for several organizations, including the European Union Institute for Security Studies, RUSI in London and the Office of Net Assessment of the U.S. Department of Defense. He holds a Ph.D. in social and political science from the European University Institute, an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a B.A. from the University of Turin.

Mauro Gilli is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies of ETH-Zurich (Switzerland). During the academic year 2015-16, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Dickey Center for International Understanding of Dartmouth College. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University, an MA from SAIS-Johns Hopkins and a B.A. from the University of Turin.

Abstract: Over the past decade, fears about the decline of the United States relative to other countries (especially China) have become a prominent feature of American political discourse. While anxiety about losing power on the world stage has been a recurrent phenomenon in the United States since the 1950s, the present bout of pessimism – combining reactions to the disastrous Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, and most recently the rise of Donald Trump – makes this the deepest and most serious crisis of confidence in postwar American history. This project explores the domestic political and strategic consequences of anxiety about lost or eroding national status by combining insights from social theory and social psychology. I use evidence from historical cases of decline (including Spain after 1898, France after 1945 and the United Kingdom after 1945) as well as survey experiments to investigate hypotheses about the heterogenous ways in which different individuals and groups react to relative national decline, and how these responses combine to influence the declining state’s politics and foreign policy. 

Speaker bio: Steven Ward is a Junior Faculty Fellow at CISAC for the year 2017-2018 and an Assistant Professor in the Government Department at Cornell University. He holds an MA in Security Studies and a PhD in Government from Georgetown University. He is the author of Status and the Challenge of Rising Powers (Cambridge University Press, 2017). His work has appeared in Security Studies and International Studies Quarterly.

Co-sponsored by the Southeast Asia Program and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies

Transnational Islam lacks the centralized leadership and institutions associated with Catholicism. Yet hierarchical and authoritative bodies do make decisions regarding Islam in various contemporary settings, including within the institutional frameworks of states. What happens when Muslim faith and practice are adapted to the terms and procedures of bureaucracy and the modern nation-state?

Dr. Müller will present an original conceptual framework for studying the bureaucratization of Islam. He will apply it to five Southeast Asian cases—Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore. State bureaucracies in these countries vary widely, but generally they aim to influence or control trends and meanings in local Islamic discourse. Drawing on current debates in the anthropology of the state, with particular reference to Brunei and Singapore, Müller will offer an original analytic framework to explain similarities and differences in bureaucratized Islam in Southeast Asia. Possible implications beyond the region will also be explored.

Dominik Müller

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