Wilson Center Experts

My interest in biological weapons issues first emerged during my graduate work in the sciences at Princeton University, where I developed a side interest in science policy issues.  During that time, I studied technical security issues under Frank von Hippel, a physics/policy professor at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School.  From this experience, I began my first forays into research on security issues resulting from the dissolution of the former Soviet weapons complex and became acquainted with other scientists working in the technical security field.  After receiving my Ph.D. in biological chemistry, I transitioned from a scientific career to one in science policy. For the next five years, I conducted security policy research at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies within the Monterey Institute of International Studies, the Peace Studies Program at Cornell University, the Cooperative Monitoring Center at Sandia National Laboratories, the Institute for Public Policy at the University of New Mexico, and the Office of Proliferation Threat Reduction in U.S. Department of State.  Through these various experiences, I developed a research program that focused on bioweapons policy issues and became professionally identified with the security policy community. My varied work experiences over the years have enabled me to develop insider and outsider perspectives on how the U.S. government and non-government policy communities think about, and respond to, bioweapons threats.

Although these policy-oriented positions were fruitful learning experiences, they left me dissatisfied with the existing tools and policy frameworks for understanding bioweapons threats and how to design appropriate policy responses. For example, although I was involved in many policy forums that argued over the utility of U.S. nonproliferation programs, I found little in-depth analysis that attempted to fundamentally understand the development and proliferation of weapons technologies that were grounded in real-world cases. Moreover, as time went on, the policy rhetoric of a “growing bioweapons threat,” which as a newcomer to the security policy field I had largely adopted, began to fall short. Over time, I found growing empirical evidence that indicated a less straightforward set of conclusions about terrorist and state development of biological weapons. Furthermore, my own bioweapons-related research indicated a much more complex set of factors that seemed to shape proliferation threats compared to existing policy discourse. 

As a result of this growing intellectual dissatisfaction with existing policy frameworks, I began exploring, through self-directed study, alternative theoretical tools to inform my work.  This inquiry led me to literature in the field of science and technology studies that examined the role of tacit knowledge in scientific practice. This literature resonated with my own personal laboratory experiences in graduate school, as well as with interview data that I had collected in my bioweapons-related policy research on the former Soviet bioweapons complex.  By involving close engagement with scientific practice, policymaking, and social science scholarship, my work proposes a new way of analyzing weapons-related technologies and threats that can inform policymakers, intelligence analysts, and academic scholars.  In doing so, my work aims to create a new and generative intellectual conversation between academia and policy.

Education

B.A. Chemistry, Biology, Spanish, Drury College; M.A., Chemistry, Princeton University; Ph.D. Chemistry, Princeton University.