Barry M. Blechman is the cofounder of the Stimson Center and a distinguished fellow focused on nuclear disarmament; he chaired Stimson's board from 1989 to 2007. Blechman has nearly fifty years of distinguished service in national security in both the public and private sectors. He is an expert on US foreign and military policies, military strategy, and defense budgets and industries and has worked in the departments of State and Defense; he has also served on the Defense Policy Board and the Department of State Advisory Committee on Transformational Diplomacy. Blechman founded DFI International Inc., a research consultancy, in 1984 and served as its CEO until 2007. He holds a PhD in international relations from Georgetown University, has taught at several universities, and has written extensively on national security issues.
Chandré Gould is a senior researcher in the Crime and Justice Programme of the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa. Previously, she was involved in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's investigation of Project Coast, the South African apartheid government's chemical and biological weapons program. She has published on this topic and others, including small arms, South Africa's criminal justice system, and human trafficking.
David E. Hoffman is a contributing editor at the Washington Post and Foreign Policy magazine. For the Post, he covered the White House during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and worked subsequently as diplomatic correspondent and Jerusalem correspondent. From 1995 to 2001, he served as Moscow bureau chief, and later as foreign editor and assistant managing editor for foreign news. He is the author of The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy (2009), which was awarded the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, and The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (2002).
Iris Hunger heads the Research Group for Biological Arms Control at the Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker Centre for Science and Peace Research at the University of Hamburg. A biochemist with a PhD in political science, Hunger previously worked for the UN Department for Disarmament Affairs in Geneva, assisting the members of the Biological Weapons Convention attempting to negotiate a verification protocol for the treaty, and for the Planning Staff of the German Federal Foreign Office in Berlin, where she was responsible for questions of weapons of mass destruction control and antiterrorism measures. She has published on a wide variety of biological disarmament topics.
Ursula Jenal obtained her PhD in microbiology from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and in 1991 started her career as a scientist in charge of environmental risk assessment studies at Electrowatt Infra Ltd. in Zürich, Switzerland, followed by a post-doc on bioremediation at Stanford University. After joining the Swiss Agency for the Environment, Forest, and Landscape in 1996, she co-authored Swiss biotechnology regulations, oversaw biosafety research projects, and assessed the biorisk of a wide variety of research projects, including gene therapy. Jenal, who has represented Switzerland at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's working group in biotechnology, launched Jenal & Partners Biosafety Consulting in 2001. She is representing the European Biosafety Association at the meetings of the Biological Weapons Convention and can be reached at [email protected].
Filippa Lentzos is a senior research fellow in the BIOS Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science. BIOS is an international center for research and policy on social aspects of the life sciences and biomedicine. Lentzos's primary research interests are focused on biosecurity and synthetic biology and the range of social, ethical, political, legal, economic, and geographical issues associated with these two key emerging research themes in the field of biomedicine and society. She is especially interested in the social shaping of risks and threats, and in the social organization and deployment of evidence, facts, and knowledge.
Jez Littlewood is an assistant professor at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University, Ottawa. He leads the intelligence and national security concentration of the master's degree program. He is the author of The Biological Weapons Convention (Ashgate, 2005) and more than twenty articles and reports on biological weapons controls. He served previously under secondment to the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (from 2005 to 2007) and under contract with the UN Department of Disarmament Affairs (from 1999 to 2001).
Caitríona McLeish is a senior research fellow at the SPRU, University of Sussex, where she has been part of the Harvard Sussex Program since 1996. McLeish's research interests focus on the dual-use problem in both the chemical and biological warfare environments. Her research includes analysis of past programs, especially procurement and acquisition routes, assessments of contemporary dual-use chemical and biological weapons policies, assessments of contemporary dual-use chemical and biological weapons policies, and examination of the roles played by non-traditional security actors, such as industry and global civil society, in chemical and biological disarmament. She is currently leading a project examining the future of science and technology reviews in the BWC context that is funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council.
Roger Roffey is a senior scientist with the Swedish Defense Research Agency and has worked in biodefense research since 1975. He is the former head of Sweden's biodefense program and has served as a technical and policy advisor to the Swedish foreign affairs and defense ministries, including for the Biological Weapons Convention VEREX and protocol negotiations. His research has focused on biodefense, bioterrorism, threat assessment, nonproliferation, and arms control, as well as applied microbiological research.
Animesh Roul is cofounder and executive director of research for the Society for the Study of Peace and Conflict in New Delhi. In this capacity, he collaborates with independent think tanks, media houses, and policy organizations in India and abroad and contributes regularly to web portals, newspapers, and scholarly journals. He specializes in research on terrorism, armed conflict, and issues relating to arms control and proliferation in South Asia. Roul has been associated with the BioWeapons Prevention Project and the Chemical Weapons Convention Coalition. He is the principal researcher for the “India Country Report” in “Bioweapons Monitor 2010” and “Bioweapons Monitor 2011” (forthcoming).
Shen Dingli is a professor of international relations at Fudan University, Shanghai. He is the executive dean of Fudan University's Institute of International Studies, and the director of the Center for American Studies. He co-founded and directs China's first non-government-based Program on Arms Control and Regional Studies at Fudan. His teaching and research/writing covers China-US relations, regional and international security, arms control and nonproliferation, foreign and defense policy of China and the United States, and other topics. He is vice president of the Chinese Association of South Asian Studies, and of the Shanghai Association of International Studies. He received his PhD in physics from Fudan in 1989 and did his post-doc in arms control at Princeton University from 1989 to 1991.
Nicholas A. Sims is an emeritus reader in international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), where he taught from 1968 to 2010. His research and writing have specialized in disarmament treaties and their review and reinforcement. His books on the Biological Weapons Convention include The Diplomacy of Biological Disarmament (St. Martin's Press, 1988), The Evolution of Biological Disarmament (Oxford University Press, 2001), and The Future of Biological Disarmament (Routledge, 2009).
Amy E. Smithson specializes in in-depth field research on issues related to chemical and biological weapons proliferation, threat reduction mechanisms, defense, and homeland security. Now a senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, she previously worked this portfolio at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Henry L. Stimson Center. Her latest work is Germ Gambits: The Bioweapons Dilemma, Iraq and Beyond (Stanford University Press, 2011).
Philippe Stroot, who holds a PhD in biological sciences, was appointed biosafety officer shortly after joining GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals as international vaccine training manager in 1990. He later served as the operations manager for research and development and then as the global biosafety manager in charge of harmonizing the company's biosafety program worldwide. A founding member of the European Biosafety Association, Stroot has been actively involved in international activities to establish biorisk management and biosafety standards. In 2003, Stroot branched out to launch his own biosafety consulting firm, Xibios, based in Europe; he can be reached at [email protected].
Ralf Trapp is an independent consultant with more than thirty years of experience in environmental chemistry/toxicology and chemical/biological weapons arms control. Previously, he worked at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, was a member of the German delegation to the Conference on Disarmament, served as the deputy director of the Research Institute of Chemical Toxicology of the East German Academy of Sciences, and conducted research at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik Ebenhausen in Germany and at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in Sweden.
Cindy Vestergaard is a project researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. Her focus is on WMD diplomacy and governance, and she is a member of the Chemical Weapons Convention Coalition, Fissile Materials Working Group, and the European Non-Proliferation Consortium. Previously, she worked in Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade on nonproliferation, arms control and disarmament policy, and program implementation.
Jean Pascal Zanders is a research fellow at the Institute for Security Studies of the European Union, where his research covers armament, disarmament, and nonproliferation of unconventional weapons as well as space policy, topics on which he has published extensively. Previously, he led the Chemical and Biological Warfare Project at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and directed the BioWeapons Prevention Project.