In this conversation, Huang and Diamond will talk about a variety of issues associated with notable challenges confronting democracy in Taiwan. Specifically, their topics will include Taiwan's democracy and China's democratic development, Taiwan's relations with the U.S., Cross-strait relations, and Taiwan's diplomacy.

The Honorable James C. F. Huang is Minister of Foreign Affairs of Republic of China (Taiwan). Before he was appointed Foreign Minister, Huang served as Deputy Secretary-General (2004-2005) and Director-General of Department of Public Affairs at Office of the President (2002-2004). He also served as Deputy Director-General (2001-2002) of Department of Information and Liaison and Senior Researcher (2000-2001) at Mainland Affairs Council of Executive Yuan.

Larry Diamond is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy. At Stanford University, he is professor by courtesy of political science and sociology, and he coordinates the democracy program of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), within the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI).

Tonya Putnam is currently a visiting scholar at CISAC and an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University. She received her PhD in political science from Stanford, and a JD from Harvard Law School. Putnam's research covers a range of issues in international relations and international law with a focus on mechanisms of rule making and enforcement.

Christopher Blattman is currently completing a PhD in economics at UC Berkeley and holds a master's degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of conflict and violence, the organization of guerrilla groups, as well as what post-conflict development policies work, for whom, and why. He recently completed a survey of war-affected men and boys in northern Uganda, and is presently conducting a similar survey of women and girls. Two randomized evaluations of post-conflict programs are planned in the same region for 2007, one studying the role of a group-based economic intervention in promoting community reintegration of ex-combatants, and another studying the introduction of a government and an independent press into communities not currently served by newspapers.

James Fearon is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, a professor of political science and CISAC affiliated faculty member at Stanford University. His research has focused on democracy and international disputes, explanations for interstate wars, and, most recently, the causes of civil and especially ethnic violence. He is presently working on a book manuscript (with David Laitin) on civil war since 1945. Representative publications include "Neotrusteeship and the Problem of Weak States" (International Security, Spring 2004), "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War" (APSR, February 2003), and "Rationalist Explanations for War" (International Organization, Summer 1995). Fearon won the 1999 Karl Deutsch Award, which is "presented annually to a scholar under the age of forty, or within ten years of the acquisition of his or her doctoral degree, who is judged to have made, through a body publications, the most significant contribution to the study of international relations and peace research." He was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences in 2002.

Dara Kay Cohen is a PhD candidate in political science at Stanford University and was a fellow and research assistant at CISAC in 2004-2005 and 2005-2006. Her research at CISAC involved studying the politics of national security; she examined the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, how security issues have affected congressional elections and co-wrote a paper with Jacob N. Shapiro on the failure of the homeland security alert system. Her current dissertation research focuses on the use of sexual violence during civil wars, and she spend last summer in Sierra Leone conducting initial field work. She previously worked at the Department of Justice as a paralegal in the Outstanding Scholars Program in the Counterterrorism Section and at the u.S. Embassy in London on terrorist financing issues. She received her a.B. in political science and philosophy with honors from Brown University in 2001.

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, with a PhD in political science from Stanford as well as a law degree from Yale, focuses his scholarship on how organizations cope with the legal responsibility for managing complex criminal justice, regulatory, and international security problems. He has published the leading academic paper on the operation of federal money laundering laws, and one of the most exhaustive empirical case studies of public participation in regulatory rulemaking proceedings. Recent projects address the role of criminal enforcement in managing transnational threats, the physical safety of refugee communities in the developing world, legislative and budgetary dynamics affecting the federal Department of Homeland Security, and the impact of bureaucratic structure on how institutions implement legal mandates. Professor Cuéllar is an affiliated faculty member at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation, and a member of the Executive committee for the Stanford International Initiative. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2001, he served as senior advisor to the u.S. Treasury Department's Undersecretary for Enforcement and clerked for Chief Judge Mary M. Schroeder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Bary R. Weingast is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution as well as the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University; he served as chair of that department from 1996 to 2001. He is also a professor of economics, by courtesy, at the university. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences from 1993 to 1994. Weingast is an expert in political economy and public policy, the political foundation of markets and economic reform, U.S. politics, and regulation. His current research focuses on the political determinants of public policymaking and the political foundations of markets and democracy. Weingast is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the 2006 recipient of the William H. Riker Prize in Political Science. He received the Heinz Eulau Award for Best paper from the American Political Science Review in 1987. With Charles Stewart, he received the Award for Best Paper n Political History b the American Political Science Association in 1994 and again in 1998. He is also the recipient, along with Kenneth Schultz, of the Franklin L. Burdette Award for Best paper Presented at the 1994 Political Science Association Meeting.

Paul Stockton is a senior research scholar at CISAC. He was formerly the associate provost at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and was the former director of its Center for Homeland Defense and Security. His teaching and research focus son how U.S. security institutions respond to changes in the threat (including the rise of terrorism), and the interaction of Congress and the Executive branch in restructuring national security budgets, policies and institutional arrangement.s Stockton joined the faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School in August 1990. From 1995 until 2000, he served as director of NPS's Center for Civil-Military Relations. From 2000-2001, he founded and served as the acting dean of NPS's School of International Graduate Studies. He was appointed associate provost in 2001.

Ambassador James E. Goodby is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a research affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has held several senior government positions dedicated to arms control and nonproliferation, including deputy to the special adviser to the president and secretary of state on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), 2000-2001; special representative of President Clinton for the security and dismantlement of nuclear weapons, 1995-1996; chief negotiator for nuclear threat reduction agreements, 1993-1994, and vice chair of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty talks, 1982-1983. He served as U.S. ambassador to Finland in 1980-1981.

Bart Bernstein is a Professor of American history at Stanford University. He has written very widely on post-World War II American history, including the surrender of Japan at the end of World War II, economic policy, diplomacy, nuclear history, and scientific discovery.

Matthew Kroenig is a doctoral candidate in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, the Herbert York Fellow at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California, and a predoctoral fellow at CISAC. His dissertation explains the strategic incentives that drive states to provide nuclear weapons technology to nonnuclear-weapon states. His other research focuses on international security, nuclear weapons proliferation, homeland security, terrorism, and civil war. His writings have appeared in such publications as Democratization, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Newsday, and Security Studies.

Kroenig has also served as a strategist in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he was a principal author of key national security strategy and defense review documents and where he led the development of a U.S. government-wide strategy for deterring terrorist networks. For his work, Kroenig received the Department of Defense's Award for Outstanding Achievement.

The Center for Science, Technology and Security Policy at the American Association for the Advancement of Science has assembled a panel of experts to examine the technical aspects of the Reliable Replacement Warhead program. The speaker will discuss the preliminary findings of this panel.

Benn Tannenbaum is Project Director at the Center for Science, Technology and Security Policy. Tannenbaum works on a variety of projects for CSTSP, including drafting policy briefs, tracking legislation, serving as liaison with MacArthur-funded centers and the security policy community, organizing workshops and other meetings, attending Congressional hearings and conducting topical research. He testified before the House Homeland Security Committee on radiation portal monitors. Tannenbaum also serves on the American Physical Society's Panel on Public Affairs and on the Program Committee for the Forum on Physics and Society. Prior to joining AAAS, Tannenbaum worked as a senior research analyst for the Federation of American Scientists. He worked extensively on the FAS paper "Flying Blind"; this paper explores ways to increase the quality and consistency of science advising to the federal government. Before joining FAS, Tannenbaum served as the 2002-2003 American Physical Society Congressional Science Fellow. During his fellowship, Tannenbaum worked for Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-MA) on nonproliferation issues. Before his fellowship, Tannenbaum worked as a postdoctoral rellow at the University of California, Los Angeles. At UCLA, he was involved in the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Collider Detector Facility at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago. He received his PhD in particle physics from the University of New Mexico in 1997. His dissertation involved a search for evidence of supersymmetry. None was found.

A key pillar and unmet need in the defense against threats to health is the ability to recognize the etiological factor(s) and predict the course of disease, at early points in the timeline of the process. This ability would enable early intervention in the disease process when there is the greatest likelihood of benefit, as well as triaging of hosts, based on individual need. Genomic tools and approaches have enabled a more detailed description of host-microbe encounters, and shed light on fundamentally important processes, including the cellular responses associated with infection. Genome-wide transcript-abundance profiles, like other comprehensive molecular readouts of host physiological state, provide a detailed blueprint of the host-pathogen dialogue during microbial disease. Studies of cancer based on genome-wide transcript-abundance profiles have led to novel signatures that predict disease outcome and serve as useful clinical classifiers. The highly dynamic and compartmentalized aspects of the host response to pathogens complicate efforts to identify predictive signatures for infectious diseases. Yet, studies of systemic infectious diseases so far suggest the possibility of successfully discriminating between different types (classes) of infection and predicting clinical outcome. In addition, host gene expression analysis could lead to the identification of early signatures associated with a protective immune response, both to natural infection and to vaccination. Early explorations in some of these areas indicate the potential feasibility of this approach but also point to important unmet challenges.

David Relman is associate professor of medicine, and of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University. He is also chief, infectious diseases section, at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System in Palo Alto, California.

A native of Boston, Massachusetts, Relman holds an SB degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his MD degree, magna cum laude, from Harvard Medical School in 1982. Following postdoctoral clinical training at Massachusetts General Hospital in internal medicine and in infectious diseases, Relman served as a postdoctoral research fellow in microbiology at Stanford University in the laboratory of Stanley Falkow from 1986 until 1992. He joined the Stanford University faculty in 1992 and was appointed associate professor (with tenure) in 2001. His research is directed towards the characterization of the human indigenous microbial communities of the mouth and gut, with emphasis on understanding variation in diversity, succession, the effects of disturbance, and the role of these communities in oral and intestinal disease.

Experimental approaches include molecular phylogenetics, ecological statistics, single cell genomics, and community-wide metagenomics. A second area of research concerns the classification structure of humans and non-human primates with systemic infectious diseases, based on patterns of genome-wide gene transcript abundance in blood and other tissues. The goals of this work are to recognize classes of pathogen and predict clinical outcome at early time points in the disease process, as well as gain further insights into virulence (e.g., of variola and monkeypox viruses). Past achievements include the description of a novel approach for identifying previously-unknown pathogens (selected as one of the 50 most important papers of the last century by the American Society for Microbiology), the identification of a number of new human microbial pathogens, including the agent of Whipple's disease, and the most extensive descriptions to date of the human indigenous microbial community. See http://relman.stanford.edu. Relman received the Squibb Award from the Infectious Diseases Society of America (2001), the Senior Scholar Award in Global Infectious Diseases from the Ellison Medical Foundation (2002), and is a recipient of an NIH Director's Pioneer Award (2006). He is a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2003.

Relman currently serves on the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research and was a member of the Board of Directors of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (2003-2006), and co-chair of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Advances in Technology and the Prevention of Their Application to Next Generation Biowarfare (2004-2006). He is a member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, the Institute of Medicine's Forum on Microbial Threats, and advises several U.S. Government departments and agencies on matters related to microbial pathogen detection and future biological threats.

Nuclear fuel supply assurance is a long-term issue that has been studied in various venues since the beginning of the nuclear area. This topic has recently gained greater urgency with various countries now embarking on their own nuclear power programs and considering construction of their own fuel cycle facilities, including enrichment plants, to provide for their own fuel. Some of these fuel facilities could however be diverted for weapons material production within clandestine military programs. In this context the assured provision of internationally supplied nuclear fuel and fuel supply guarantees are meant to discourage new nuclear countries from developing domestic sensitive fuel cycle facilities. An IAEA initiative on this topic has culminated in a September 2006 IAEA Special Event Seminar held in conjunction with the 50th General Conference. Eleven different proposals for instituting fuel supply assurance arrangements were presented (some prior to and some during) the meeting. Noted among them was the NTI proposal that included a commitment from Warren Buffet to contribute 50 Million Dollars towards the purchase of a Uranium stockpile that would form the basis of a Nuclear Fuel Bank to be managed by the IAEA.

In this presentation I will review and comment on the recent supply assurance proposals made. I will discuss technical and institutional issues I have raised in reviewing these proposals, and I will rank all the proposals based on their ease of implementation and contribution to nonproliferation.

Chaim Braun is a CISAC science fellow working on issues of nuclear power and nonproliferation. Prior to his Stanford position, Braun worked in various technical and management positions in Altos Management Partners, Bechtel Power Corporation, United Engineers and Constructors, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), and Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). While at CISAC Chaim authored papers with Chris Chyba on "Proliferation Rings" and with Mike May on "International Regime for Fresh Fuel Supply and Spent Fuel Disposal." He also co-authored two chapters in the CISAC book , U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy: Confronting Today's Threats, made numerous technical presentations, and was instrumental in bringing to CISAC the research project on U.N. Security Council Resolution 1540.

The speaker will present European views on current nuclar issues (deterrence, proliferation) and their implications for U.S. policy.

Bruno Tertrais is a senior research fellow at the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique (FRS), as well as an associate researcher at the Centres d'études et de recherches internationales (CERI). He is also a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), and contributing editor to Survival. His latest book is War Without End (New York: The New Press, 2005).