Sonja Schmid is a social science research associate at Stanford University. Having received her Ph.D. in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University, she is now a science fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, and affiliated with the Program in Science, Technology and Society at Stanford. Her research has focused on understanding complex decision-making processes at the interface between science, technology, and the state in the Cold War Soviet context, and is based on extensive archival research and narrative interviews with nuclear energy specialists in Russia. She is currently working on a book about reactor design choices and the development of the civilian nuclear industry in the Soviet Union. In addition, she is involved in an international research project on Cold War Technopolitics and Colonialism, where she works on Soviet technology transfer to Central and Eastern Europe. Her research interests also include risk communication, and the popularization of science and technology, subjects on which she has published in the past.

The United Nations Secretariat--the main part of the UN bureaucracy directly under the Secretary-General--has arguably changed or been challenged more than any other part of the UN system in recent years, with more and more mandates and rising expectations. Though much attention has been given to the reform of the Security Council, and though Washington has made UN 'management reform' a core pillar of its UN policy since the Oil-for-Food scandal, the UN Secretariat has nevertheless proved singularly impervious to even the common sense suggestions for improvement. In many ways, there is a greater gap today than at any time in the past between what the Secretariat does, what it's meant to do, and the capacity it has. Why has improvement been so difficult and what have been the recurrent mistakes of UN reform efforts? With the election of a new Secretary-General due in late 2006, can we think about the UN bureaucracy in a different and more practical way?

Thant Myint-U is a visiting senior fellow at the International Peace Academy. He is also a senior advisor to the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum at the Social Science Research Council and a Fellow of the Cambridge University Centre for History and Economics.

From 2000-2006 he worked in the United Nations Secretariat, first for the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and then for the Department of Political Affairs (DPA). From 2004-5 he was Chief of DPA's Policy Planning Unit of the Department of Political and in 2005-6 he was a Senior Political Officer in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General. In 2004 he was also a member of the Secretariat of the Secretary-General's High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change.

Thant Myint-U has also served on three United Nations peacekeeping operations, with UNTAC in Cambodia in 1992-3 and with UNPROFOR and UNMIBH in the former Yugoslavia from 1994-6. In 1994 he was the UN's senior spokesman in Sarajavo.

From 1994-1999 Thant Myint-U was a fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, where he researched and taught Asian and British imperial history. He received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1988, his master's degree in international relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in 1992 and his PhD in history from Cambridge University in 1996.

He is the author of several published and broadcast works, including two books: The Making of Modern Burma (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and The River of Lost Footsteps: Remembering Burma's Past (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2006 forthcoming).

The working title of his PHD project is Democracy besides Elections: An Exploration into the Development and Causes of Respect for Civil Liberties in Latin American and Post-Communist Countries. The dissertation addresses the extent of civil liberty (freedom of: opinion and expression, assembly and association, religion, movement and residence as well as independent courts) in 20 Latin American and 28 post-communist countries. Apart from tracking the development of respect for civil liberties from the late 1970's till 2003, it also attempts to explain the present level of respect by examining different structural explanations, such as historical experience with liberty, ethno-religious composition, modernization and natural resources (primarily oil).

Skaaning has constructed his own dataset and index on civil liberties based on coding of the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices from 1977 to 2003, which he uses in his descriptive analysis of the development and as the dependent variable in the subsequent causal assessment. In this stage of the research, he both undertakes intraregional analyses, utilizing the fuzzy-set method and OLS-regression, and interregional comparisons.

Skaaning received his B.A. (2000) and M.A. (2003) in Political Science from the University of Aarhus, Denmark, where he is also a PHD scholar in the final year. Parts of his MA degree were completed at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität (Heidelberg) and Freie Universität (Berlin).

David Hafemeister is a Science Fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation (2005-6). He is also Professor (emeritus) of Physics at California Polytechnic State University. He spent a dozen years in Washington as Professional Staff Member, Senate Committees on Foreign Relations and Governmental Affairs (1990-93 on arms control treaties at the end of the Cold War), Science Advisor to Senator John Glenn (1975-77), Special Assistant to Under Secretary of State Benson and Deputy-Under Secretary Nye (1977-78), Visiting Scientist in the State Department's Office of Nuclear Proliferation Policy (1979), the Office of Strategic Nuclear Policy (1987) and Study Director at the National Academy of Sciences (2000-02). He also held appointments at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, and the Lawrence-Berkeley, Argonne and Los Alamos national laboratories. He was Chair of the APS Forum on Physics and Society (1985-6) and the APS Panel on Public Affairs (1996-7). He has written/edited ten books and 140 articles and was awarded the APS Szilard award in 1996.

Jacob N. Shapiro is a graduate student in political science at Stanford University and a homeland security fellow at CISAC. He is also an associate at the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy and teaches on terrorist financing at the Naval Postgraduate School. His research focuses on the organizational dynamics of terrorist groups. His current projects use economic and sociological organization theory to examine the interactions between individual motivations and organizational structure in covert groups. As a Naval Reserve officer he was assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Naval Warfare Development Command. Prior to attending Stanford, he served on active duty at Special Boat Team 20 and onboard the USS Arthur W. Radford (DD-968). He received his BA with honors in political science from the University of Michigan.

About the speaker: Achin Vanaik, fellow and board member of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam is one of the most important analysts of contemporary Indian politics. The author of The Painful Transition: Bourgeois Democracy in India (1990), The Furies of Indian Communalism: Religion, Modernity and Secularization (1997) and Globalization and South Asia (2004.)

Vanaik has served on the board of directors of GreenPeace (India), and as an assistant editor for The Times of India. He writes regularly for the Economic and Political Weekly, The Times and The Telegraph and has written extensively on the nuclear question in south Asia.

Dr. Vanaik's lecture is co-sponsored with the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University.

John Barton is a professor emeritus at the Stanford Law School, an FSI senior fellow by courtesy, and a CHP/PCOR associate. His research and publications focus on international scientific research and cooperation, the relationship between intellectual property and antitrust, and the transfer of technology -- particularly vaccine production technology -- to developing countries. Barton has recently published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association on the pharmaceutical development process, and is co-author of the product development priorities chapter in the forthcoming book Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries. He has participated extensively in discussions regarding drug access for developing nations. He is also interested in the marketing structure of the pharmaceutical industry and the impact of vaccine regulation on the structure of the international vaccine industry.

Dr. Ronald F. Lehman II is Director of the Center for Global Security Research (CGSR) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Ron also is Chairman of the Governing Board of the International Science and Technology Center (ISTC) in Moscow. . He serves on the State Department Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board (ACNAB) and as a member of the Department of Defense Threat Reduction Advisory Committee (TRAC). Previously, he was the Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and has served in the Defense Department as Assistant Secretary, in the State Department as U.S. Chief Negotiator on Strategic Offensive Arms (START), and in the White House as Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.

Tuan H. Nguyen is the Herbert York Fellow in the Center for Global Security Research at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In addition, he is a member of the Forensic Science Center in the Chemistry and Materials Science Directorate at Livermore. Dr. Nguyen has been an Adjunct Professor of Chemistry at California State University, East Bay. He received his BS in biochemistry and a PhD in organic chemistry.

Who influences policy outcomes in the Philippines? While most analysts agree that the quality of policymaking has been poor, they offer two very different explanations. Some blame a too-strong presidency: Presidents keep personal control over policy, so policies change when one president succeeds another. Discontinuity undermines performance. Other observers blame the power of congress: Legislators have stymied presidential agendas for reform, while presidents have been powerless to stop congress from failing to act or from acting to undermine reform. Takeshi Kawanaka takes a different approach. He argues that while presidents have control of fiscal policy, congress is dominant when it comes to ordinary legislation. It is the allocation not the concentration of power that facilitates short-sighted pork-barrel politics and inhibits the growth of cohesive and disciplined political parties.

Takeshi Kawanaka, a visiting scholar in the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, has written mainly on Philippine politics. After two years of field work on local governance and political machines, he wrote Power in a Philippine City (2002). More recently he edited The Philippines in the Post EDSA Period (2005, in Japanese), which deals with the interaction between democratic consolidation and economic liberalization. His current research is on the role of political institutions in shaping policy outcomes in new democracies. He received his PhD in political science from Kobe University, and his MA and BA from Waseda University.