Belfer Center announces 2000-01 fellows

The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (BCSIA) at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) is the hub of research, teaching, and training in international security affairs; environmental and resource issues; science and technology policy; and conflict studies.

The center’s mission is to provide leadership in advancing policy-relevant knowledge about the most important challenges of international security and other critical issues where science, technology, and international affairs intersect.

At the heart of the Belfer center is its resident research community — 150 scholars including Harvard faculty, analysts, practitioners, and each year a new, international, interdisciplinary group of research fellows. The fellows join the center to work with senior researchers and faculty in the center’s research programs and projects.

The Fellows

The Environment and Natural Resources Program (ENRP) is the locus of Harvard’s interdisciplinary research on resource and environmental problems and policy responses

The 2000-01 fellows for ENRP are as follows:

David Cash is doctoral candidate at KSG studying the role of science in environmental policy. He focuses on how scientific assessments of global environmental risks are linked to local environmental risk management and decision making.

Sheila Cavanagh is a doctoral candidate at KSG working on the finance of environmental infrastructure. Cavanagh examines municipal services such as drinking water distribution and wastewater collection systems in low-income communities and transition economies.

Robert Corell is an oceanographer and engineer. He is engaged in research concerned with the sciences of global change and with the interface between science and public policy.

Karen Filipovich is associate research director with the ENRP. She focuses on climate change and Russia’s forestry and energy sectors. She also studies change in energy use due to increased use of networked systems and is helping to build a regionally based environmental monitoring framework using the Appalachian Trail as a model.

Charles H.W. Foster is an environmental policy specialist in natural resources with more than 15 years of government experience. He has a special interest in the management of natural resources and environment issues across jurisdictional boundaries.

Alexander Golub specializes in global environmental issues, environmental protection finance, and natural resources management. He serves as an adviser both to the Russian government on greenhouse gas emissions reduction and trading policy, and to the Kazakhstan government on greenhouse gas trading strategy.

William Haney has been a co-founder or founding investor in a number of high-tech companies and is interested in international forestry, sustainable development, and environmental technology.

Cheryl Holdren studies agricultural pest control and the accumulating scientific data on both public health and ecological consequences of continued dependence on synthetic chemical pesticides.

Nathaniel Keohane, a doctoral candidate in political economy and government at Harvard, studies the effects of environmental policy on the adoption and evolution of pollution-control technologies. He also researches environmental restoration, federalism in environmental policy, and the political economy of environmental policy instrument choice.

Ruben Lubowski is a doctoral candidate in political economy and government at Harvard whose research interests include land use and forest management. He is conducting an econometric study of land-use changes in the United States to estimate the marginal costs of sequestering carbon through forestry activities.

Alix Peterson is a doctoral student at KSG whose research interests lie at the interface of environment and development, including the costs of climate change adaptation, land use change in developing countries, and the use of informal regulation for local pollutants.

Laszlo Pinter focuses on the effectiveness of integrated environmental assessment and reporting to communicate key issues to public and private sector decision makers.

Rasmus Rasmusson is an economist and a long-time Swedish diplomat. He focuses on the promotion of sustainable development with an emphasis on how developing countries can best fulfill their obligations to phase out ozone-damaging substances under the Montreal Protocol.

Lori Snyder is a doctoral student at KSG focusing on environmental economics, policy, and econometrics. She has worked on cost-benefit analyses of proposed regulations addressing a wide range of environmental issues including air quality, water quality, and toxic substance exposure.

Edmond Toy is a doctoral student in health policy who focuses on the energy, safety, and environmental impacts of passenger vehicles in the American transportation sector.

The Global Environmental Assessment Project (GEA) seeks to promote better understanding of the relationships between science, assessment, policy, and management in societies’ efforts to grapple with global environmental change.

This year’s GEA fellows are:

Frank Alcock is a doctoral candidate in political science at Duke University whose research interests include international relations theory, global environmental politics, and the political economy of natural resource industries. He is researching industry conflict, political bargaining, and policy enforcement in the fishery sectors of North Atlantic coastal states.

Aarti Gupta is a doctoral candidate in forestry and environmental studies at Yale University whose research interests lie in the area of international environmental policy-making. She is especially interested in the effectiveness of global attempts to manage novel environmental risks, such as those posed by genetic engineering, which are scientifically uncertain yet require recourse to scientific expertise for their management.

Bernd Kasemir has been engaged in social science research on global change. Based at the Swiss Federal Institute for Environmental Science and Technology, he worked on a project that studied public participation in integrated assessments of global change. At Harvard he will study the needs of financial managers for global change assessments.

Myanna Lahsen’s research has focused on the construction of scientific knowledge within U.S. scientific and political institutions, and on the negotiation and presentation of this knowledge by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Marybeth Long-Martello (ENRP/ STPP) focuses on intersections of science and environment-development politics. At Harvard she will examine the formation of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), the shared identity of its members, and ways in which assessment practices and knowledge regarding sea-level rise have shaped and been shaped by the AOSIS.

Bernd Siebenhuene’s work addresses various aspects of global and national environmental policy as well as environmental education and training; business strategies for environmental management; and ecological ethics. At Harvard, he will examine how learning processes within global environmental assessments are initiated and take place.

The Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program (STPP) analyzes ways in which public policies influence science and technology for security, sustainability, and economic competitiveness, how science and technology policies are made, and how they influence and are influenced by the broader society. The program includes specific research projects on information policy; nuclear technologies; energy innovation; government policies to promote innovation; legal, political, and cultural studies of science and technology; and science and technology policy processes.

The 2000-01 fellows for STPP are as follows:

Philip Auerswald studies early-stage, technology-based innovation focusing on the economics of technological change, industrial organization, and international political economy.

Robert Doubleday is a doctoral student at University College, London, in the Geography and Science and Technology Departments. He is at Harvard on a Fulbright Scholarship to study innovations in agricultural biotechnology, with a focus on how information about consumer attitudes to genetically modified organisms is used in the governance of biotechnology, and the implications for corporate research and development strategies.

Ariane König conducts research on risk analysis and will develop proposals for institutional adaptation required for the implementation of risk communication programs and risk management measures for novel technologies based on the commercialization of genetically modified crops.

Shobita Parthasarathy is a doctoral candidate in science and technology studies at Cornell University. She is conducting research on the development of policies and practices for breast cancer genetic testing in the United States and Great Britain, comparing how genetic medicine and political order are produced in two cultural contexts.

Jennifer Reardon is a doctoral candidate in science and technology studies at Cornell University. She is researching the scientific, political, and racial construction of human genetic diversity research. She also studies new government practices to address issues of collective rights raised by the new genetics of population differences.

Mariachiara Tallachini studied law in Italy and focuses on environmental policy and bio-legal issues. She has studied legal regulation of biotechnology and the ethical and legal problems of tissue engineering.

Robert Treindl focuses on changes in environmental and public health regulation in Japan and northeast Asia, as well as on trends in the regulation of technical change. He is working on a book on the regulation of technical change in Japan and the politics of expertise in Japanese approaches to public health, and environmental and construction safety regulation.

Theodora Welch is a doctoral candidate at Concordia University, Montreal, doing research on ownership transformation and organizational innovation in the global telecommunications industry. She specializes in privatization, corporate restructuring, and global telecommunications.

Tao Wenzhao is a professor at Renmin University in China and works on Internet affairs and civil society. His recent research has focused on Internet and social development, particularly Internet and e-commerce policy in China.

The Harvard Information Infrastructure Project (HIIP) identifies key issues and guides responsible policy relating to information infrastructure, its development, use, and growth.

The 2000-01 fellows for HIIP are as follows:

Peng Hwa Ang is a vice dean and teaches media management and media law and ethics at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests are media freedom and censorship. Most recently, he has studied Internet self-regulation, self-rating, and filtering.

Nolan Bowie is a former New York assistant attorney general who will continue his work exploring the digital divide — looking at issues of technology access, opportunity, and digital democracy and community.

Mary Rundle comes to Harvard from the World Trade Organization and will analyze various proposals for strengthening the international financial system and assess how vulnerable they are to information technology overtaking them.

Charles Wiecha has worked on programming tools for Internet applications at IBM Research. He focuses on issues related to bridging the digital divide including developing new technologies to reduce the cost of supporting diversity among users and devices on the Internet; understanding the usability requirements of new and nontraditional users; and informing debate by helping to bridge the technical and policy communities.

The Managing the Atom Project (MTA) is a joint project of STPP, ENRP, and the International Security Program (ISP) and addresses democratic governance in nuclear decision making and the intersection between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons.

This year’s fellows for the MTA are:

Samina Ahmed’s research focuses on U.S. nonproliferation policy towards South Asia with particular emphasis on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program and the arms race in South Asia.

Darryl Farber’s research focuses on the role of the public in civilian nuclear decision making. His objective is to interpret how different policy positions and management strategies for decommissioning nuclear facilities make sense from different stakeholder perspectives yet produce conflict among the stakeholders.

Evan Feigenbaum works with the Executive Program for Senior Chinese Military Officers and focuses on Chinese defense and foreign policy, U.S.-Chinese relations, and East Asian security issues.

Adinarayantampi Gopalakrishnan is a senior fellow with the Managing the Atom and Energy Technology Innovation. He served as chairman of India’s nuclear regulatory agency, the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board. Gopalakrishnan examines nuclear power and safety issues. At Harvard he will develop a strategy for U.S.-India cooperation on clean coal power technologies.

Jim Walsh focuses on nuclear decision making and why countries decide against acquiring nuclear weapons. He has investigated nuclear policy in a number of countries, including Egypt, Indonesia, Italy, and Australia, and recently began a new project on Iran.

Hui Zhang’s current research interests include verification techniques of nuclear arms control, the control of fissile material, nuclear safeguards and nonproliferation, nuclear power, and China’s nuclear policy.

The Energy Technology Innovation Project (ETIP) focuses on collaborative approaches to greenhouse-gas limitation and how public policy can support private sector investments in the development and adoption of environmental innovations.

The 2000-01 fellows for ETIP are:

Robert Margolis is a doctoral candidate in science, technology, and environmental policy at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is interested in public funding of research and development and other policy mechanisms for promoting the development and deployment of cleaner energy technologies.

Ambuj Sagar is currently focusing on energy innovation systems, climate change, and environmental management, with a special emphasis on examining these issues in the Indian context. His broader research interests center on technology policy and environment policy, especially in developing countries.

Jimin Zhao is a doctoral candidate in civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. Her research interests include development and implementation of environmental policies; implementation of international environmental agreements; cleaner technology and energy technology; and climate change, with particular focus on environmental policy in China.

For more information about events, activities, and research at the Belfer Center, visit the Web site at http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/bcsia.