Representing the United States Air Force, Lieutenant Colonel John Vitacca is a national defense fellow for 2009-2010 at CISAC. 

John holds a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in Marketing from Texas A&M University, a Master of Business Administration degree in Management from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a Master of Arts degree in Military Operational Art and Science from Air Command and Staff College, Air University, Alabama.  He is a command pilot with over 3,400 flight hours in the B-2 and B-52, qualified as both an instructor and evaluator pilot.  Prior to coming to CISAC, John served in various assignments including a tour at the Pentagon as the Chief of the Global Persistent Attack Branch and the B-2/Next Generation Bomber subject matter expert.   Most recently, he was the Commander of the 393d Bomb Squadron at Whiteman Air Force Base, one of only two operational B-2 stealth bomber squadrons in the USAF.  His research at CISAC will focus on nuclear weapons policy issues.

Ambassador Kinsman retired from the Canadian Foreign Service in 2006. Over his 40 years of service, he was Chairman of Policy Planning and later Political Director before being named Canada's Ambassador in Moscow in 1992. He was subsequently Ambassador in Rome (1996-2000), High Commissioner in London (2000-2002), and Ambassador to the EU in Brussels (2002-2006). Earlier postings abroad included being Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN in New York and Minister for Political Affairs in Washington. From 1985 to 1989 he was the senior federal official responsible for Cultural Affairs and Broadcasting where he was responsible for preparing the still-current Broadcasting Act, on which he continues to consult.

Today Ambassador Kinsman is a Contributing Writer for Policy Options magazine, a regular commentator for CBC News, and is published widely elsewhere, such as in the International Herald Tribune. He is a frequent speaker and lecturer in Europe and North America, and in 2007-2008 was Diplomat in Residence at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. In fall, 2009 he will be a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.

He has been a member of numerous Boards, including the Imperial War Museum, London, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, and the European Policy Centre, and several non-profit Boards, including the Council for a Community of Democracies, and the Victoria Conservatory of Music. His principal business contribution is to the Dundee Group of companies, and he sits as an independent Director on the Board of Dundee Precious Metals, Toronto.

He attended Princeton University and the Institut d'Etudes Politiques, Paris. He lives on Vancouver Island with his wife Hana.

Gerald Nelson, Senior Research Fellow at IFPRI will be giving a talk on Climate and Agriculture in the Context of Copenhagen. Nelson received his PhD from Stanford University in 1982. Since that time he has served as the Agricultural Development Council representative at the University of the Philippines, Los Banos from 1982-85, and as assistant, associate and full professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign from 1985 to 2008. He is now an agricultural economist at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, DC specializing in climate change.

Dr. Stephen Flynn served as a senior policy advisor on homeland security during the Obama campaign and during the presidential transition. Since May 2009, he has been supporting the Department of Homeland Security in drafting of the first Quadrennial Homeland Security Review (QHSR) that will be presented to Congress by DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano in Jan 2010. In addition, he has been assisting the newly created National Security Council Directorate for Resilience Policy on integrating the concept of resilience into presidential guidance on national preparedness. He will discuss how the homeland security mission is being recalibrated by the Obama Administration to place greater emphasis on building national capacity to withstand, quickly recover from, and adapt to man-made and natural disasters.

About the speaker:

In December 2009, Dr. Stephen Flynn becomes the fifth President of the Center for National Policy (www.cnponline.org), founded in 1981.  Prior to being selected to lead CNP, he spent a decade as a senior fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.  Following the election of President Barack Obama, he served as the lead policy advisor on homeland security for the presidential transition team.  He is a member of the bipartisan National Security Preparedness Group, co-chaired by former 9/11 commissioners, Governor Tom Kean and Congressman Lee Hamilton.

Dr. Flynn is the author of the critically acclaimed The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation (Random House, 2007), and the national bestseller, America the Vulnerable (HarperCollins 2004).  He is a Consulting Professor at the Center of International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at the Wharton School's Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the University of Pennsylvania.  Since 9/11 he has provided testimony on twenty-two occasions on Capitol Hill.  Dr. Flynn is also a member of the Marine Board of the National Research Council. Prior to September 11, 2001, he served as an expert advisor to U.S. Commission on National Security (Hart-Rudman Commission), and following the 9/11 attacks he was the principle advisor to the bipartisan Congressional Port Security Caucus, and advised the Bush Administration on maritime and homeland security issues. 

He is a frequent media commentator and has appeared on Meet the Press, 60 Minutes, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, The Today Show, the Charlie Rose Show, CNN and on National Public Radio.  Four of his articles have been published in the prestigious journal, Foreign Affairs.  Excerpts of his books have been featured in Time, as the cover story for U.S. News & World Report, and as the subject of two CNN documentaries.

A 1982 graduate of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, Dr. Flynn served in the Coast Guard on active duty for 20 years, including two tours as commanding officer at sea, received several professional awards including the Legion of Merit, and retired at the rank of Commander.  As a Coast Guard officer, he served in the White House Military Office during the George H.W. Bush administration and as a director for Global Issues on the National Security Council staff during the Clinton administration. 

Dr. Flynn received the M.A.L.D. and Ph.D. degrees in International Politics from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, in 1990 and 1991.  He was a Guest Scholar in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution from 1991-92, and in 1993-94 he was an Annenberg Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.   He has been a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations since 1999.

Dr. Flynn is the principal for Stephen E. Flynn Associates LLC, where he provides independent advisory services on improving enterprise resiliency and critical infrastructure protection, and transportation and maritime security.

Born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1960, Dr. Flynn lives in Connecticut with his wife JoAnn and their daughter Christina.

In 2005 the Indonesian government announced a program of unconditional cash transfers to its poor and near-poor citizens to help them overcome the adverse effects of fuel price hikes caused by a massive reduction in subsidies.  The program—the largest of its kind in the world, covering some 19 million households—was reintroduced in 2008 following another round of fuel subsidy cuts.

How successful was this effort to help poor Indonesians weather these economic shocks?  Did the transfers alleviate suffering to the desired extent?  Did their unconditional character ensure quick action and wide coverage?  Or did it foster dependence on public welfare and depress incentives to work?  Were deserving recipients chosen?  Or did corruption and conflict distort the process?  Are there lessons in Indonesia’s experience applicable to other developing countries?  Dr. Sudarno will mobilize quantitative and qualitative evidence to address these questions.

Sudarno Sumarto co-founded The SMERU Research Institute and served as its director for nearly ten years.  Under his leadership, SMERU played a vanguard role in helping to reduce poverty in Indonesia through careful empirical research on behalf of improved public policy.  His more than fifty publications include studies of economic growth, poverty and unemployment reduction, and the performance of primary-school pupils, among other topics, in the Journal of Development Economics (2009), Beyond Food Production (2007), and SMERU’s own working paper series, among other venues.  He has also been active as an advisor to the Indonesian government on poverty issues and as a lecturer at the Bogor Institute of Agriculture.

Prior to coming to CISAC, Joe was the project director and leader for the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s team in the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) design feasibility study.  He will share his experiences and knowledge from over 25 years at Los Alamos and multiple projects related to nuclear weapons design and maintenance, plutonium storage and disposition, stockpile life extension and plutonium aging.  Following a slide show, he will be available for a question and answer session.
 
This is the second in a series of informal gatherings aimed at providing first hand, in-depth information on a variety of topics.  Different from more a formal research seminar, these informal discussions will provide first hand information and Q&A opportunities to facilitate wider understanding and to catalyze potential unrealized research opportunities.

Dr. Joseph C. Martz is a 25 year employee of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in which he has served in a variety of research, leadership, and management positions.  His career has focused on nuclear weapons and materials, and he has lead and participated on a variety of projects related to nuclear weapon design and maintenance, plutonium storage and disposition, stockpile life extension and plutonium aging.  His early work led to a nationwide evaluation and repackaging of stored nuclear materials, and he was a co-developer of the ARIES system, a means to dismantle and safely recover plutonium from excess nuclear weapons.  Dr. Martz technical focus has been on plutonium surface chemistry and metallurgy, including oxidation, dispersal mechanisms, and plutonium aging.  He is a long-time contributor to the Enhanced Surveillance Program for the stockpile, including the evaluation and predictive assessment of aging effects in stockpile materials and components.   Most recently, Dr. Martz was the project director and leader for the New Mexico team in the recent Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) design feasibility study.  Dr. Martz is the author of over 50 papers and invited presentations in these areas.  He holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.

David Hamburg is president emeritus at Carnegie Corporation of New York, where he served as the Corporation's eleventh president from 1982 to 1997. Under his leadership the work of the Corporation focused on education and healthy development of children and youth, human resources in developing countries and international security issues. He established a number of task forces on education and preventing conflict which produced seminal research and policy analysis and which will continue to influence the work in these fields in the future.

A medical doctor, Hamburg had a long history of leadership in the research, medical and psychiatric fields before his transition from a trustee of Carnegie to its president. He was chief, adult psychiatry branch, National Institutes of Health, from 1958 to 1961; professor and chairman of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University from 1961 to 1972; Reed-Hodgson Professor of Human Biology at Stanford University from 1972 to 1976; president of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, 1975-1980; and director of the division of health policy research and education and John D. MacArthur Professor of Health Policy at Harvard University, 1980-1983. He served as president and then chairman of the board (1984-1986) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Hamburg was a member of the United States Defense Policy Board with Secretary of Defense William Perry and cochair with former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict. He is a member of President Clinton's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology and a visiting professor at Harvard Medical School's department of social medicine. He was the founder of the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology and Government.

Hamburg received both his A.B. and M.D. degrees from Indiana University. He has received numerous honorary degrees during his career as well as the American Psychiatric Association's Distinguished Service Award in 1991, the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House in 1996, the International Peace Academy's 25th Anniversary Special Award in 1996, the Achievement in Children and Public Policy Award from the Society for Research in Child Development in 1997, and the National Academy of Sciences' Public Welfare Medal in 1998.

I will provide an overview of current ideas for devising a nuclear fuel cycle that minimizes proliferation risks, ranging from alternatives to the current method of spent fuel reprocessing to novel reactor designs.  While the ultimate conclusion should not be a surprise - 'proliferation-proof technology' in indeed an (double) oxymoron - it is nevertheless important to recognize the role that probabilistic risk assessment can and should play in assessing the relative merits of proposed technologies.

Dr. Robert Rosner is a visiting professor at CISAC for 2009-2010.  He is the William E. Wrather Distinguished Service Professor in the departments of Astronomy & Astrophysics and Physics at the University of Chicago.  Dr. Rosner recently stepped down as Director of Argonne National Laboratory, where he had also served as Chief Scientist.

Professor Rosner's research is mostly in the areas of plasma astrophysics and astrophysical fluid dynamics and magnetohydrodynamics (including especially solar and stellar magnetic fields); high energy density physics; boundary mixing instabilities; combustion modeling; applications of stochastic differential equations and optimization problems; and inverse methods.

"I have continued research interest overlap with the DOE/ASCI Flash Center at Chicago (which I led for its first five years); this Center has been a pioneer in the development of computational astrophysics codes with broad applicability to other disciplines; and I have been closely involved in that Center's research activities in flame modeling and interfacial mixing. I have also been involved with a Wisconsin/Chicago/Princeton NSF-supported Physics Frontier Center focusing on problems lying at the boundary of astrophysics and laboratory plasma physics, mostly in areas related to magnetohydrodynamic instabilities in low Prandtl number fluids (such as liquid metals, or stellar interiors).

"In addition over the past 7+ years -- through my work at Argonne National Laboratory - I became heavily involved in issues related to science and technology policy and management, especially in areas related to energy, climate, and modeling and simulations, national security, as well as (via my chairmanship of the Department of Energy National Laboratory Directors' Council as well as my work with the Council on Competitiveness) with national policy issues related to STEM workforce development, nuclear and renewable energy technology development, and the role of national laboratories in scientific, technological, and industrial competitiveness, including the relationship between national laboratories, academia, and industry."