Heidi Kjærnet will be presenting her paper "Petroleum sector management in Azerbaijan: A case study of the national oil company SOCAR". The paper focuses on the interactions between the Azerbaijani government and the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan, SOCAR, and explores the complex interconnections between the government and its national oil company (NOC). In the post-Soviet period, SOCAR has played the role as the national partner in consortiums with international oil companies producing oil and gas fields in Azerbaijan, as well as having important policy tasks and social responsibilities.

The paper argues that there is a profound lack of separation of commercial and regulatory responsibility in the Azerbaijani petroleum sector. While Azerbaijan is certainly giving preferential treatment to SOCAR, Heidi argues Baku is less likely to follow the example of Kazakhstan in pursuing a resource nationalist line through curtailing the activities of international oil companies due to the Azerbaijani government's ambitions for regional leadership in the South Caucasus, and its strong commitment to cooperating with the international oil companies.

Heidi's research on SOCAR and Azerbaijan is a part of her PhD dissertation with the working title "Petroleum, politics and power: The National Oil Companies of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia".

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Heidi Kjærnet is a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) at Stanford University.  She is visiting from the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and the Fridtjof Nansen Institute where she is a Research Fellow.

She holds an MA in Russia and Post-Soviet Affairs from the University of Oslo. She has taken intensive Russian language courses at the Norwegian Center in St Petersburg and interned at the Royal Norwegian Embassy to Azerbaijan. Currently she is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Tromso.

Edward Blandford is a Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC. His research focuses on nuclear reactor design at the system level as it impacts security issues for future nuclear infrastructure. In particular, his interests involve the design of advanced reactors with an emphasis on security, emergency preparedness, threat of theft of material, and international safeguards. This work also focuses on the utilization of risk analysis early in the reactor design process to ensure that safety, security, and structural functional requirements are met reliably. In addition to security applications, other research interests include nuclear reactor thermal-hydraulics in support of the safety of nuclear installations, probabilistic risk assessment, performance-based regulation, best-estimate code verification and validation, and material degradation management.

Before coming to CISAC, Edward was a graduate student researcher in the Nuclear Engineering Department at the University of California at Berkeley. His Ph.D. dissertation focused on the design of reduced-scale experiments for advanced high temperature reactors and their role in validating computational models. He received his M.S. in nuclear engineering from UC Berkeley in 2008.

Prior to pursuing graduate work, he worked at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) as a project manager in the Steam Generator Management Program where he managed all thermal-hydraulics related research activity. While at EPRI, Edward worked on a variety of industry-related activities related to material degradation issues and improving plant management.  

Edward studied mechanical engineering at the University of California at Los Angles where he earned a B.S. in 2002. During this period of time, he held Department of Energy research fellowships at both Brookhaven National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory working on nuclear and particle physics applications respectively.