FSI researchers examine the role of energy sources from regulatory, economic and societal angles. The Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) investigates how the production and consumption of energy affect human welfare and environmental quality. Professors assess natural gas and coal markets, as well as the smart energy grid and how to create effective climate policy in an imperfect world. This includes how state-owned enterprises – like oil companies – affect energy markets around the world. Regulatory barriers are examined for understanding obstacles to lowering carbon in energy services. Realistic cap and trade policies in California are studied, as is the creation of a giant coal market in China.
Stanford University has announced the establishment of a new center at Peking University, which will serve as a base for research, teaching, meetings and conferences. One of the first of its kind created by a university on a Chinese campus, SCPKU represents a visionary commitment by Stanford leaders and a group of alumni, parents and friends of the university worldwide. Stanford's location on the Pacific Rim provides an advantage in fostering U.S. China relations and the new center will establish a strategic hub for Stanford's interdisciplinary work on a host of global issues.
SCPKU is an exciting project on many levels.
It's a dynamic platform that will facilitate the entry of all seven schools at
Stanford into the heart of the contemporary Chinese scene
-Coit Blacker
One of the major donors to the center is Chien Lee,'75, MS'75, MBA'79, an FSI Advisory Board member and Hong-Kong based private investor whose family's foundation is the lead donor to the center. For Lee, the collaboration between Stanford and the prestigious Peking University is central. "It will be a good partnership," he says. "When you get great people together you can really achieve something."
The SCPKU building will be named for Lee's father, the late Lee Jung Sen, who attended Peking University when it was Yenching University. Lee's mother Leatrice Lowe Lee was a member of the Stanford class of 1945.
Stanford's relationship with China stretches back to the late 1970's when the university began accepting Chinese graduate students. Students from China have accounted for the largest number of Stanford foreign graduate student enrollment for the past decade.
The project owes much to the gifted leadership and dedication of Jean C. Oi, Andrew G. Walder, and Coit D. Blacker who envisioned a way to bolster Stanford research, training, teaching, and outreach activities in China. Oi is the William Haas Professor in Chinese Politics, Director of the Stanford China Program, and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute. Walder is the Denise O'Leary and Kent Thiry Professor of Sociology, a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, and the Fisher Family Director of the Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences. Blacker is the Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute and the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor in International Studies.
As Oi notes, "Stanford has had a strong collaboration with PKU for nearly a decade." The Bing Overseas Studies Program is well established at PKU and hosts roughly 70 Stanford undergraduates on the campus annually. "This project is a natural extension of that relationship," she says.
For Blacker, "SCPKU is an exciting project on many levels. It's a dynamic platform that will facilitate the entry of all seven schools at Stanford into the heart of the contemporary Chinese scene." As he notes, "the new facility will give faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates unprecedented access to their Chinese counterparts at a key moment in the development of relations between our two countries."
The traditional Chinese building will surround a courtyard. Beneath the ground floor, a state of the art facility two stories deep will feature attractive classrooms, offices, and conference spaces with all modern amenities. The new facility will be administered by the Freeman Spogli Institute.
SCPKU will provide a base of operations for field research, coursework, language study, and internships, allowing faculty and students from across the university to study the region, its peoples and cultures, and issues as they play out on the global scene.
The center will also serve students and faculty whose interests fall outside the traditional definition of "China studies." Scholars will pursue such topics as energy and energy use, education and educational reform, the rural/urban interface, and problems associated with aging populations. As Blacker points out, "China is a great laboratory for scholars and students working on a wide range of issues."
Gi-Wook Shin, the Director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center emphasizes how important it is to have an in country venue to engage Chinese scholars. "It's more convenient for Asians to come to a place in China than to come to California for a conference or seminar that we host," he says. "It's important for Stanford to have a strong presence in China so we can engage Asian people on Asian issues."
The center will be completed in late 2011, with a formal opening planned for 2012.
Matthias Englert is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. Before joining CISAC in 2009, he was a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Research Group Science Technology and Security (IANUS) and a PhD student at the department of physics at Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany.
His major research interests include nonproliferation, disarmament, arms control, nuclear postures and warheads, fissile material and production technologies, the civil use of nuclear power and its role in future energy scenarios and the possibility of nuclear terrorism. His research during his stay at CISAC focuses primarily on the technology of gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment, the implications of their use for the nonproliferation regime, and on technical and political measures to manage proliferation risks.
Englert has participated in projects investigating technical aspects of the concept of proliferation resistance with topics including the conversion of research reactors, uranium enrichment with gas centrifuges, reducing plutonium stockpiles with reactor-based options, spallation neutron sources and fusion power plants. Additional research topics have included fissile material stockpiles, fuel-cycles and accelerator driven systems.
Although a substantial part of his professional work recently has been technical he is equally interested in and actively studies the historical, social and political aspects of the use of nuclear technologies. Research interests include the dispute about Article IV of the NPT, the future development of the NPT regime, possibilities for a nuclear weapons-free world, preventive arms control, and the history and development of proliferation relevant programs. By studying contemporary theory in philosophy through the interaction of science, technology and society, Englert has acquired analytical tools to reflect on approaches describing or addressing the problem of ambivalent technology.
Englert is a vice speaker of the working group Physics and Disarmament of the German Physical Society (DPG) and a board member of the German Research Association for Science, Disarmament and Security (FONAS).
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
This talk reviews three decades of Indian nuclear decision-making. It argues that India’s slow pace of weaponization in the face of Pakistani nuclearization and Sino- Pakistani nuclear cooperation in the 1980s, the slack in building an institutional capacity to wield nuclear weapons after they came into existence in the 1990s, and the reluctant attempts at developing an operational arsenal even after formally claiming nuclear power status and almost going to war with a nuclear Pakistan in the last decade, constitute puzzling behavior. Existing proliferation models explain facets of Indian nuclear behavior. However, they don’t explain it in its totality. The different facets of Indian nuclear decision making in the last three decades can be collapsed into a single dependent variable: the lag in strategic decision-making. This talk operationalizes the concept of ‘lag’, critically reviews existing explanations of Indian nuclear behavior, and offers an alternative framework for understanding Indian nuclear decision-making.
Gaurav Kampani is a sixth year doctoral student at Cornell University's Department of Government. His major and minor fields are International Relations and Comparative Politics. Kampani's research interests cover international security and focus on the relationship between domestic institutions and strategic policy, military strategy, operations planning, and weapons development.
Kampani's dissertation project studies Indian civil-military institutions and nuclear weapons-related operational practices in the decade prior 1998 and the decade since.
Between 1998-2005, Kampani worked on South Asia-related nuclear and missile proliferation issues at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey CA.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
John Downer received his MA/MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University, his MA in Sociology from the University of Edinburgh, and his doctorate in Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. His dissertation was on "The Burden of Proof: Regulating Ultra-High Reliability in Civil Aviation." Downer then worked at the London School of Economics' Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR), where he began re-working his dissertation for publication as a book titled "Black Box/Check Box: Assessing Critical Technologies" (forthcoming from MIT Press's Inside Technology series). Downer brings the sociology of knowledge to bear on discourses about technology policy and governance, taking insights from a close empirical study of technological knowledge-production-the US Federal Aviation Administration's assessment of new aircraft designs-and drawing out implications for broader questions about risk and governance in a world of pacemakers and nuclear power-stations. At CISAC, Downer is exploring the sociology and epistemology of failure and its implications for the governance of nuclear technologies.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
As Asian coal demand skyrockets, the world's largest coal exporter now faces a number of critical challenges: infrastructure constraints, emerging carbon policy, resource depletion, and regulatory challenges. Drawing on a detailed analysis of Australia's coal industry since WWII, Dr. Bart Lucarelli addresses key questions that will shape both the Australian and global coal trade in the coming decade.
Covering everything from new mining investments to the potentially disruptive emergence of a the coal bed methane sector and Australia's investments in carbon capture and storage, the study offers the most comprehensive, forward-looking analysis of Australia's coal sector available in print.
It is now widely recognized that a rigorous, policy-relevant impact evaluation embeds the counterfactual analysis of impact in a wider analysis of the underlying program theory (theory of change) of the intervention, also referred to as causal chain analysis. Unpacking the causal chain requires a combination of factual and counterfactual analysis. The seminar will present examples of causal chains. The types of data collection and analysis – both quantitative and qualitative – to analyze the different links in the chain will be discussed. A major challenge in mixed methods is to truly integrate quantitative and qualitative approaches.
About the speaker
Howard White formerly led the impact evaluation program of the Independent Evaluation Group of the World Bank, where he was responsible for impact studies on basic education in Ghana, health and nutrition in Bangladesh, rural electrification, rural development in Andhra Pradesh and a review of impact studies of water supply and sanitation.
Philippines Conference Room
