Speakers
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KENNETTE BENEDICT
Former Executive Director and Publisher, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists |
Benedict served as executive director and publisher from 2005-2015 of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the leading scholarly magazine about threats to humanity from nuclear weapons, climate change, and emerging technologies. She also published columns and articles about nuclear weapons and disarmament, nuclear power, climate change, and global governance.
She now teaches at the University of Chicago, where she is also a Senior Fellow at the Energy Policy Institute, and writes a regular column for the Bulletin. Before joining the Bulletin, Benedict was the Director of International Peace and Security at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation from 1991-2005, overseeing grant making on a broad international security agenda, as well as supporting efforts to reduce the threat from weapons of mass destruction and an initiative on science, technology, and security. She also established and directed from 1992-2002 the foundation’s initiative in the former Soviet Union. Previously she taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She received her BA from Oberlin College and her PhD in political science from Stanford University. |
CATHRYN CARSON
Associate Professor, UC Berkeley - History |
Cathryn Carson is Associate Professor in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. She is a historian of science and technology, with an emphasis on modern physics. Her books include Heisenberg in the Atomic Age: Science and the Public Sphere (2010) and co-edited volumes on Reappraising Oppenheimer: Centennial Studies and Reflections (2005, with David A. Hollinger), Weimar Culture and Quantum Mechanics (2011, with Alexei Kojevnikov and Helmuth Trischler), and Reflections on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident (2015, with Joonhong Ahn et al.).
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SYLVAIN COSTES
Staff Scientist Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory |
Sylvain Costes is a Staff Scientist in the Life Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dr. Costes specializes in high-throughput fluorescence microscopy, DNA damage quantification, image analysis, and computer modeling for radiation risk. He developed, under the NASA Specialized Center of Research (NSCOR) and the Department of Energy (DOE) low-dose radiation programs, novel imaging approaches to assess DNA damage in human cells. Dr. Costes is an active member of the Radiation Research Society and he is part of the leadership team of the Institute of Resilient Communities (IRC), a Berkeley Lab institute dedicated to providing tools that enhance resilience in communities locally and globally. Dr. Costes is the CSO and co-founder of the Berkeley Lab spin-off startup Exogen Biotechnology Inc., a company using Costes' high throughput DNA damage technology to provide phenotypic test for individuals, research institutes, clinics and hospitals interested in evaluating individual's sensitivity to genotoxic stress such as radiation or certain chemicals.
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JAY DAVIS
Hertz Senior Fellow The Hertz Foundation |
Jay Davis is a past president of the Hertz Foundation, and currently serves as Hertz Senior Fellow. Davis is a nuclear physicist trained at the Universities of Texas (BA ‘63, MA ‘64) and Wisconsin (PhD ‘69) where he did fast neutron experiments with Heinz Barschall. During his three-decade career at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), he built accelerators for research in nuclear physics, materials science, and multiple applications of nuclear analytical techniques. In 1988, Davis founded the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, the world’s most versatile and productive AMS laboratory, creating isotopic tracing and tagging tools for research programs in the geosciences, toxicology, nutritional sciences, oncology, archaeology, and nuclear forensics. At the time he left LLNL to join the Department of Defense in 1998, he was the associate director for Earth and Environmental Sciences.
In the national security component of his career, he worked to develop techniques for arms control treaties, was a senior member of the NEST program, served as an inspector in Iraq for UNSCOM after the First Gulf War, and then served as the founding director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). As director of DTRA, he merged three DoD organizations to create DoD’s operating and technical focus for dealing with all aspects of weapons of mass destruction. As Director of DTRA, he had executive responsibility for all US inspection processes. Among his honors are Phi Beta Kappa and Junior Fellow at Texas, an Atomic Energy Commission Postdoctoral Fellowship at Wisconsin, and being twice given the Distinguished Public Service Medal, DoD’s highest civilian award. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and has served on its Panel on Public Affairs. He has chaired the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board of the National Academy of Sciences and served on numerous APS and NAS studies. Davis’s continuing interests are in the areas of arms control, nuclear forensics, counter-terrorism, and management of change in organizations. |
DAVID HOEL
Distinguished University Professor Medical University of South Carolina |
David Hoel received his BS degree in mathematics from U.C. Berkeley followed by a PhD from UNC Chapel Hill and a post doc in preventive medicine from Stanford. He is a distinguished university professor at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. Previously he was a Division Director at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) of N.I.H. being responsible for epidemiology, biostatistics, biochemical toxicology and molecular toxicology. Prior to joining N.I.H. he worked for 2 years at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the biology division. While at NIEHS he spent 3 years working at RERF in Hiroshima on the health effects of ionizing radiation and has participated in monitoring radiation levels in the Fukushima area. Currently he is a member of the National Academy’s science advisory committee for RERF and has served as a member of BEIR V and the Radiation Advisory Committee of EPA’s Science Advisory Committee. He has served on numerous National Academy Committees and international committees such as IARC, UNSCEAR and IAEA. Finally he is a member of several scientific organizations including the National Academy of Medicine.
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JACQUES HYMANS
Associate Professor University of Southern California |
Jacques E.C. Hymans is associate professor of international relations at the University of Southern California. His research focuses on international security affairs and on national identity. His most recent book, Achieving Nuclear Ambitions: Scientists, Politicians, and Proliferation (Cambridge University Press, 2012) was awarded the 2014 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, the 2013 American Political Science Association Don K. Price Award for best book published during the last three years on science, technology and environmental politics, and the 2013 National Academy for Public Administration Louis Brownlow Award for best book published during the last two years on public administration. His first book, The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation: Identity, Emotions, and Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2006) was awarded the International Society of Political Psychology’s Alexander L. George Book Award for best book on political psychology and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies’ Edgar S. Furniss Book Award for best first book on national and international security. Hymans has also published journal articles in Foreign Affairs, International Security, European Journal of International Relations and others, and he is an editorial board member of several academic journals including International Studies Quarterly.
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MARTIN FACKLER
Journalist-in-Residence Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation |
Martin Fackler covered Japan and the Korean peninsula as Tokyo bureau chief for the New York Times from 2009 to 2015. In 2012, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for his and his colleagues' investigative stories on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown that the prize committee said offered a "powerful exploration of serious mistakes concealed by authorities in Japan." Fackler is also the author (in Japanese) of the bestseller “Credibility Lost: The Crisis in Japanese Newspaper Journalism after Fukushima,” a critical look at Japanese media coverage of the 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster. In total, he spent a decade in the Tokyo bureau of the New York Times, where he also served as economics correspondent. Before joining the Times in 2005, he worked in Tokyo for the Wall Street Journal, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Associated Press and Bloomberg News, and in Beijing and Shanghai for AP. He has Masters degrees in journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana and in East Asian history from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently Journalist-in-Residence at the Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation, a Tokyo-based think tank.
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ATSUSHI MORIYAMA
Associate Professor University of Shizuoka |
Atsushi Moriyama is Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations, School of International Relations, at the University of Shizuoka. His research of modern Japanese history includes an emphasis on intelligence history.
His publications and presentations have focused on political process and decision-making leading up to the conflict between Japan and the U.S. during World War II. He has analyzed Japan’s wartime policy and diplomacy based on intelligence documents and the inner workings of Japan’s political and military leadership. Moriyama is author of Nihon wa naze kaisen ni fumikitta ka (Why Japan decided to enter the war with the U.S.) (2012) and other publications related to Japan’s wartime history. Moriyama received his B.A. in literature from Seinan Gakuin University and his Ph.D. in literature from Kyushu University. |
MASAKATSU OTA
Senior Editor Kyodo News |
Masakatsu Ota is a Senior Editor at Kyodo News, a position he has held since April 2009. He reports on a variety of nuclear issues, non-proliferation and the U.S.-Japan security relationship.
Ota is the author of six Japanese books on nuclear issues. He recently published Nichibei Kaku Mitsuyaku no Zenbo (The Whole Picture of the U.S.-Japan Secret Nuclear Deal) and Nichibei Kaku Domei (US-Japan ‘Nuclear’ Alliance). Ota joined Kyodo in April 1992 as a staff writer. After joining Kyodo, he worked as a correspondent in Hiroshima, Osaka and Takamatsu. In 2001, he became a political correspondent, covering the Prime Minister’s office and the Foreign Ministry of Japan. From April 2003 until March 2007, Ota became a Washington correspondent. In Washington, he covered a range of issues related to U.S. politics, security and nuclear policies, as well as U.S.-Japan relations and non-proliferation issues. Ota was awarded the Vaughn-Uyeda Prize in April 2007 for his investigations into the history of the U.S.-Japan security relationship, the history of the Second World War and his series of scoops on U.S. nuclear policy. He was also awarded the Peace Cooperative Journalist Fund Prize in December 2009 for his investigative reports into the secret U.S.-Japan nuclear deal during the Cold War. Ota received a B.A. in political science from Waseda University. He was awarded the Fulbright Scholarship in 1999 and conducted research at the University of Maryland from 1999 to 2000. He received a Doctorate from the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo in 2010 for his research on U.S.-Japan nuclear policy. |
ATSUYUKI SUZUKI
Professor Emeritus University of Tokyo |
Dr. Atsuyuki (Atsu) Suzuki is Professor Emeritus at the University of Tokyo. From 2010 to 2013, he was President of the Japanese Atomic Energy Agency. Prior to that, he served on the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan as Chair from 2006 and as a full-time member from 2003. He was Professor of Nuclear Engineering at the University of Tokyo for many years until his retirement in 2003.
Suzuki's major scientific interests include nuclear fuel cycle engineering, radioactive waste management and material safeguards, and energy modeling from global perspectives. He organized and completed a number of projects, including leading a security management project while at the University of Tokyo. Internationally, he was co-head of a joint study conducted by Harvard University and the University of Tokyo entitled Interim Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel, and chaired a task-force that produced a panel report at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington D.C. titled Managing the Global Nuclear Materials Threat. In 1978, Suzuki was selected as the Japanese Representative to the Eisenhower Exchange Fellowship, which provides an opportunity to study in the United States for a couple of months as an honored guest. For a year and a half from 1974 to 1975, he worked in Austria for the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, joining the global energy study group as an expert in mathematical modeling and nuclear energy. In 2014, Suzuki was honored to receive the best article award from Risk Analysis, for his paper “Managing the Fukushima Challenge”. In this paper, he presents a socio-technical view of how Japan should act on the lessons learned from the Fukushima Daiichi Accident. The Prime Minister appointed Suzuki to the Scientific Council of Japan. Internationally, he served on the Board of Nuclear and Radiation Studies at the National Academy of Sciences in the United States. Suzuki is a Fellow of the Atomic Energy Society of Japan, and was a member of the American Nuclear Society, where he served as the Associate Editor for Asia at the journal Nuclear Technology. In 2014, he was elected President of the Pacific Nuclear Council. He holds a doctorate in nuclear engineering from the University of Tokyo. |
TATSUJIRO SUZUKI
Professor University of Nagasaki |
Tatsujiro Suzuki is a Director and Professor with the Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition, Nagasaki University (RECNA). Before joining RECNA, he was a Vice Chairman of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC) Cabinet office from January 2010 to March 2014. Before that, he was an Associate Vice President for the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry in Japan (1996-2009), Visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Public Policy, the University of Tokyo (2005-009), an Associate Director of MIT’s International Program on Enhanced Nuclear Power Safety from 1988-1993 and a Research Associate at MIT’s Center for International Studies (1993-95), where he co-authored a report on Japan's plutonium program. He is also a Council Member of Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs (2007-09 and since 2014). Suzuki has a PhD in nuclear engineering from Tokyo University (1988).
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NAOKO WAKE
Associate Professor Michigan State University |
Naoko Wake is an Associate Professor of history at Michigan State University. Her field of specialization is the history of medicine, gender, sexuality in the United States and the Pacific Rim, and she is the author of Private Practices: Harry Stack Sullivan, the Science of Homosexuality, and American Liberalism (Rutgers, 2011) and the co-author (with Shinpei Takeda) of Hiroshima/Nagasaki Beyond the Ocean [Umi wo koeta Hiroshima Nagasaki] (Yururi Books, 2014). She is currently working on her second monograph Bombing Americans: Gender and Trans-Pacific Remembering after World War II, which explores the history of Japanese American and Korean American survivors of the atomic bombs with a focus on their cross-national and gendered memory, identity, and activism. She is a recent recipient of the National Science Foundation's Science, Technology, and Society Grant (co-PI), Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims Research Grant, and the Association for Asian Studies' NEAC Grant.
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