Jeffrey Pfeffer is The Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University where he has taught since 1979. He currently serves on the advisory boards for Collective Health, Medeloop, Quorso, and Veridian, and on the boards of the nonprofits Quantum Leap Healthcare and the San Francisco Playhouse. His current research focuses on the effects of work environments on human health and well-being, power and leadership in organizations, evidence-based management, the knowing-doing gap, and how thinking of time like money affects people’s choices about spending time in ways that promote unhappiness.

Omar Galárraga, PhD is a health economist and tenured Professor of Health Services, Policy and Practice at the Brown University School of Public Health. He currently serves as the Director of the Center for Global Public Health (CGPH) at Brown. Dr. Galárraga’s research applies principles from health and behavioral economics to improve public health outcomes, with a specific focus on: (a) HIV Prevention & Treatment: Designing and evaluating economic-based interventions, such as conditional economic incentives to improve adherence to antiretroviral therapy and reduce risk behaviors; (b) Health Systems: Analyzing health systems reform and insurance expansion in low- and middle-income countries; and (c) Applied Econometrics: Utilizing rigorous experimental and non-experimental methods to evaluate health interventions and policies. 

The Asia-Pacific region has witnessed some of the most remarkable economic success stories of the modern era. Japan’s postwar rise, China’s ascent to the world’s second-largest economy, India’s emergence as a top-five economic power, and Australia’s long-standing resilience despite its small population all testify to the region’s dynamism. Central to these achievements has been the ability to cultivate, attract, and utilize talent—though each country has done so in distinct ways shaped by its history, culture, and institutions. This book explores how these four "talent giants" sustained growth amid demographic decline, brain drain, and geopolitical tension, offering timely insights into the link between talent and development. In an era of intensifying global competition for talent and polarized immigration debates, this discussion could not be more timely.

Speaker:

Gi-Wook Shin is the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea in the Department of Sociology, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the founding director of the Korea Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) since 2001, all at Stanford University. In May 2024, Shin also launched the Taiwan Program at APARC. He served as director of APARC for two decades (2005-2025). As a historical-comparative and political sociologist, his research has concentrated on social movements, nationalism, development, democracy, migration, and international relations.

About the event: The threat of illicit nuclear and other radioactive materials poses a risk to international security. The analysis of post-Soviet disintegration cases of illicit trafficking suggests that those incidents were mostly opportunistic thefts resulting from a weakened security system and/or lack of strict oversight. With the growing threat of global terrorism and the emergence of various terrorist networks across the world, however, the focus has shifted to the probability of a terrorist outfit gaining access to these deadly weapons and materials, especially in South Asia. In that regard, the study identifies the role of a nuclear security regime in mitigating the risks arising from the threat of illicit trafficking incidents. It identifies a distinct nuclear security regime under the regime theory and seeks its application in a regional framework in the South Asian context. It assesses the nuclear security norms and practices of India and Pakistan and proposes a template of a regional cooperative mechanism that can be built upon the principles, norms, rules, and procedures of the nuclear security regime. The template is tailored according to the regional environment in South Asia and it has practical features that range from some ideal approaches to more realistic measures. In that regard, the proposed nuclear security regime seeks to de-securitize the nuclear security debate, which in turn, will facilitate framing nuclear security cooperation as a mutual interest and nuclear security risks as common threats even among the competitive states.

About the speaker: Sitara Noor is a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at Stanford University, California. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science in July 2025 from University of Vienna. Her research interests include nuclear security, non-proliferation, and strategic stability, with a particular focus on South Asia. She was formerly a Managing the Atom Fellow at Belfer Center from 2022 to 2024. In 2023, she was a Fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome. She also held the position of Research Fellow at VCDNP in Vienna, Austria, during 2016-2017. Earlier in her career, she worked as an International Relations Analyst at Pakistan Nuclear Regulatory Authority (2008 to 2015).

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: A cross-national shift toward lower-yield nuclear weapons has generated renewed interest in crisis dynamics near the nuclear threshold. Lower-yield nuclear weapons alter nuclear nonuse mechanisms of credibility, costliness, and normative inhibitions. In comparison to higher-yield, city-destroying nuclear weapons, the lower-yield weapons offer a less costly and therefore more credible deterrent. But by reducing costliness, they also undercut norms grounded in the devastating effects of nuclear weapons. With Kristyn Karl and Matthew Wells, I conducted nationally representative survey experiments in India and Pakistan, and in the United States and United Kingdom, to investigate how citizens consider low-yield nuclear weapons use in an escalating crisis. We offered low-yield nuclear weapons as one of three possible retaliatory strike options in different crisis scenarios, some of which involved a low-yield nuclear attack by the adversary, and we varied the vividness of information we provided about the unique effects of a nuclear explosion. We also examined how beliefs about retribution and feelings toward citizens in the rival country affect willingness to use nuclear weapons. Across the four national samples, we found evidence of both nuclear restraint and permissiveness. In three of the four countries, respondents were more willing to use nuclear weapons in retaliation if the adversary first crossed the nuclear threshold by conducting a low-yield nuclear strike. In all four samples, larger proportions of respondents preferred lower-yield to higher-yield nuclear retaliation. These and other main findings, which I will present for each of the two pairs of survey experiments, complicate theoretical understandings of the conventional-nuclear threshold and have broad implications for both deterrence mechanisms and nuclear non-use norms.

About the speaker: Lisa Langdon Koch is Associate Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College, specializing in international relations. She is the author of Nuclear Decisions: Changing the Course of Nuclear Weapons Programs (Oxford University Press, 2023), which won the Robert Jervis Best International Security Book Award. She has published numerous articles on topics like nuclear proliferation and foreign policy. Her research has been funded by the Stanton Foundation Nuclear Security Grant Program and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. In 2023, Koch received the Glenn R. Huntoon Award for Superior Teaching. She is a 2000 Harry S. Truman Scholar.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

The Payne Lectureship is named for Frank E. Payne and Arthur W. Payne, brothers who gained an appreciation for global problems through their international business operations. Their descendants endowed the annual lecture series at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies in order to raise public understanding of the complex policy issues facing the global community today and to increase support for informed international cooperation.

The Payne Distinguished Lecturer is chosen for his or her international reputation as a leader, with an emphasis on visionary thinking; a broad, practical grasp of a given field; and the capacity to clearly articulate an important perspective on the global community and its challenges.

About the event: Arms racing and future strategic stability assessments are largely focused on moving from the Cold War paradigm of two nuclear powers – the US and Russia, to the likely new reality of three nuclear peers – the US, Russia, and China.  However, there are technologies being matured that may be more important drivers of the new arms race than the increase in the number of Chinese nuclear weapon systems.  Emerging capabilities include adversary development of long-life and loitering delivery platforms, the US investment in Golden Dome and international improvements in integrated air and missile defense, the rapid advancement of AI and autonomous systems, and the potential resumption of nuclear testing.  These developments are as disruptive as the creation of intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear-powered submarines in the 1950s and have the potential to drastically change the nuclear weapons landscape.  This talk will discuss the potential impact of these emerging technologies.

About the speaker: Jill Hruby served as the Under Secretary for Nuclear Security at the Department of Energy from 2021 to 2025. Prior to that, Hruby had a 34-year career at Sandia National Laboratories, retiring as the Director in 2017. Hruby was the inaugural Sam Nunn Distinguished Fellow at NTI. Currently, Hruby is on boards at Lawrence Livermore and the Atomic Weapon Establishment. She is a member of the Anthropic National Security Advisory Committee, the National Academy Committee for International Security and Arms Control, among other advisory roles. This quarter, she is the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: Nuclear weapons are considered a prominent international status symbol that signal military strength, technological prowess, and a state’s association with the great power club. This idea of “nuclear prestige” has affected our understanding of proliferation, nonproliferation, and nuclear modernization. Debate rages on whether nuclear prestige still exists. I contribute to this debate by arguing that nuclear prestige has never been symbolically dominant in the international community’s understanding of the bomb. I offer a theory of status symbols and demonstrate that global opposition and divided superpower messaging prevented the rise of nuclear prestige. I test my argument with a case study of contestation over the meaning of the bomb and pair it with a discourse analysis of 10,000 hand-coded observations of nuclear mentions in United Nations General Debate speeches (1946 – 2025). I contribute to our understanding of nuclear symbolism, the effectiveness of the NPT, and to our understanding of international status.

About the speaker: Kevin Bustamante is the Macarthur Hennessey Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame where he earned his PhD in August 2024. His research agenda centers around questions of international security and racism, with a focus on nuclear politics. His work has been published in Security Studies and his book project examines the transformation of dominant racial ideas over the last two centuries.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

Dr. Figueroa focuses her research on developing and testing personalized digital health tools to help individuals lead healthier lives. She focuses on tailoring these tools to the needs of underserved populations, such as people from ethnic and gender minority backgrounds, low-income individuals, and those with severe mental illness. Among other projects, she studies mobile apps that use artificial intelligence to help individuals manage their mental health and increase their physical activity. She developed frameworks to conduct digital health research through a social justice and feminist intersectionality approach.