| by Jason Warburg

Recent news from members of the Monterey community and around the world.

Sightings

›› International media coverage of North Korea’s January 5 nuclear test highlighted the perspectives and insights of experts at the Institute’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), including Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, Jeffrey Lewis, Melissa Hanham, and Miles Pomper. Outlets featuring quotes from or interviews with CNS experts included the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, BBC News, CNN, Reuters, the Associated Press, HuffPost Live, and National Public Radio.

›› Former dean and current adjunct professor Wilhelm (Bill) Weber shared the news that alumnus Adrian Delgado MATI ’93 had the opportunity to meet Pope Francis last fall while Delgado was interpreting for United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Bill also shared news from the December climate talks in Paris, where Pascale Ledeur-Kraus MATI ’83 and Julien Brasseur MATI ’02 produced the French translation of Bill Gates’ paper on his initiative on energy innovation, under the supervision of Maureen Sweeney MPA ’94, a principal at Tiller Language Services in Seattle.

›› The release of Jonathan Pollard after 20 years in prison for delivering highly classified U.S. intelligence materials to Israeli operatives produced numerous op-ed commentaries, including one in the Al-Monitor referencing Professor Avner Cohen’s description of Mordechai Vanunu, convicted in Israel of revealing secrets about Israel’s nuclear program, as the “original Edward Snowden.”

›› Several alumni, including Prof. Christiane Abel MATI ’96, Prof. Laura Burian MATI ’95, and Prof. Barry Olsen MACI ’99, served as interpreters for the August 31 glacier Conference in Anchorage, Alaska, featuring speakers including President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. The Conference on Global Leadership in the Arctic: Cooperation, Innovation, Engagement and Resilience, or glacier, highlighted international and domestic priorities in the Arctic.

 

Presentations

›› Three faculty members from the Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies program were among the invited speakers at a workshop held at Oxford University in September 2015. Professors William Potter, Avner Cohen, and Jeff Knopf gave talks at a workshop titled “Re-Imagining the Global Nuclear Order,” cosponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Stanford University, and Oxford University. The conference brought together leading experts from around the world on the topics of nuclear weapons and global governance.

›› Professor Laura Burian MATI ’98 represented the Middlebury Institute at the inauguration of new Middlebury President Laurie Patton in Vermont last October. In her remarks, Prof. Burian told the audience that, “We at the Institute are delighted and honored to be the newest member of the Middlebury family because we share so many values with our Middlebury colleagues here in Vermont and around the world. We all strive to educate global citizens who can bridge cultural, organizational, disciplinary, and linguistic divides to produce sustainable and equitable solutions to global challenges.”

›› Chen Kane, the director of the Middle East Nonproliferation Project at CNS, and Philipp Bleek, an assistant professor with the Institute and a fellow at CNS, co-led a Washington, D.C., workshop cosponsored by CNS and titled “Elimination of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)—Lessons Learned.” The workshop engaged more than 40 government officials and nongovernmental experts and covered strategic, diplomatic, legal, technical, and inter- and intra-agency dynamics related to WMD elimination, as well as a number of case studies.

 

Awards and Achievements

›› Three students—Sarah Bidgood MANPTS ’16, Meagan Braun MBA/MAIEP ’15, and Miranda Diebel MBA/MAIPS ’15—were among 20 American and 20 Russian students selected to participate in Stanford University’s U.S.- Russia Forum. The program began with a fall conference in Moscow and will include eight months of work on collaborative research projects, culminating in a spring capstone conference at Stanford University. Meagan and Sarah have combined their participation at the Stanford program with professional field research supported by the Institute’s graduate initiative in Russian studies.

›› Yuniya Khan MPA ’07 was a finalist for the Fulbright National Geographic fellowship—but she didn’t win one. Rather than giving up on an initiative she believed in, however, she decided to pursue her project anyway. After completing a Frontier Market Scouts (FMS) assignment in Amsterdam, she traveled to Brazil, where she has launched her original Fulbright project, capitalizing on relationships she developed during and after her FMS experience. Visit www.emergesalvador.com for more information on Khan’s initiative to support Afro-Brazilian entrepreneurs in the town of Salvador, Brazil.

›› The Monterey Bay Chapter of the World Affairs Council gave the Singleton Scholarship Award to students Kenji Tabery MAIEP ’16 and Sarah Bidgood MANPTS ’16 at a fall luncheon that also featured Professor William Arrocha as the keynote speaker, giving a talk on “The Global Migration Crisis.”

›› Executive Director for Research Centers and Initiatives Amy Sands—whose former roles include deputy director of CNS—has recently participated on three different high-level advisory groups in the security field. In fall 2014, she was appointed to a two-year term with the U.S. Secretary of State’s International Security Advisory Board; in spring 2015, she was appointed to the Argonne National Laboratory’s National Security Advisory Board; and during the first half of 2015, she served as a member of a task force formed by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) to examine the challenges of implementing the Iran Nuclear Agreement, which produced a report titled “Six Achievable Steps for Implementing an Effective Verification Regime for a Nuclear Agreement with Iran.”

›› Professor Tsuneo Akaha has been elected to serve a three-year term (2016–19) as the Asian Studies on the Pacific Coast (ASPAC) representative on the Council of Conferences (COC) of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS). The AAS is the largest scholarly association in the world dedicated to the study of Asia. The COC serves as the liaison between AAS and its nine regional affiliates, including ASPAC, for which Prof. Akaha served as president in 2013–15.

›› Alumna Jennifer An MACI ’11 was recently honored with the Korean Literature Translation Award for New Career Translators for her translation into English of the short story “Lady Venus” by novelist Eun Heekyung. The Translation Award for New Career Translators, now in its 14th year, was created for the purpose of discovering and encouraging promising new translators. An came to the Institute as an advanced- entry student, and served as chief interpreter at the 2010 Fall Forum, as well as at TEDxMonterey 2011. Since graduating, she has worked as a freelance conference interpreter and translator for the U.S. State Department and the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva and Washington, D.C.

We have to accept the fact that as long as we have a ruthless enemy determined to attack us, there are periodically going to be successful attacks.
 
— Terrorism Studies Professor Jeffrey Bale, commenting on the November 13, 2015 Paris attacks in the Los Angeles Times

›› Last issue we reported that Alan Lovewell MAIEP ’10 who runs the nonprofit organization Real Good Fish was one of 20 winners of a $100,000 Chase Mission Main Street Grant. It turns out Lovewell was just getting started, as we learned subsequently that Real Good Fish was also one of 10 winners of the J.M.K. Innovation Prize offered by the J.M. Kaplan Foundation. The prize award consists of up to three years of support at $50,000 per year, plus $25,000 for technical assistance or project expenses.

›› CNS International Advisory Council member Cary Neiman was selected as a distinguished honoree for the Monterey Peninsula community’s Philanthropy Day 2015. At a Pebble Beach ceremony attended by Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Institute Jeff Dayton-Johnson and CNS Director Dr. William Potter, Neiman was praised for “his sustained philanthropic giving, advocacy, and support of the center’s outreach efforts.” And Potter expressed his great appreciation to Neiman for s “tireless efforts” on behalf of CNS. In addition to serving on CNS’s advisory council, Neiman also is a member of the International Advisory Board of the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation.

›› In November, Arijit Sen MAIEP ’16 was named one of eight OneEnergy Scholars for 2015. The five-year-old program, cosponsored by OneEnergy Renewables and Net Impact, recognizes graduate students who “have demonstrated exceptional leadership and vision in the renewable energy industry.” OneEnergy Scholars receive mentorship from industry professionals, personalized career counseling, internships, and networking opportunities designed to “accelerate the development” of students targeting a career in the clean-energy industry.

›› First-year student Holly Miles MAIEP ’17 received a Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowship. Pickering Fellows receive financial support, mentoring, and professional development to prepare them academically and professionally for a career in the U.S. Foreign Service. Holly describes becoming a Foreign Service officer as her, “dream job,” and says of her first semester, “I’ve met students from all over the world and have heard some fascinating stories.”

 

Collaborations

›› After taking a Spanish class with Professor Gabriel Guillén in her first semester, April Danyluk MAIEM/MPA ’16 was eager to keep practicing the language by connecting with native speakers in Monterey County. She discussed this with Guillén, who embraced the idea and immediately started exploring opportunities for students to connect with the large Hispanic community in the surrounding area. During fall semester he and April organized a pilot program that connects Institute students with a group of women in the nearby community of Soledad who would like to improve their English skills. Every month, Guillén and 14 students traveled to Soledad to engage with the women in a two-hour tandem learning session, talking about a chosen topic for five minutes in Spanish, then five minutes in English, with Guillén providing a series of discussion prompts.

›› The first-ever Chinese Innovation Forum convened on the Institute campus in October, aiming to “jump- start and create a sustainable conversation of innovation for the field of Chinese-language education.” Professors Kathi Bailey and Peter Shaw provided insightful keynote presentations, followed by a panel discussion moderated by Professor John Hedgcock. The afternoon session included an “innovation-swap” trade fair showcasing innovative language-teaching methods.

›› Professor Ed Laurance and six students spent fall semester evaluating a violence-reduction program conducted by the organizations UCAN and Ceasefire in Chicago. The program recruits mature former gang members to work in high-violence areas to interrupt violence before it starts and work to change the behavior of high-risk youth involved in violence. The students—Chris Callaghan MPA ’16, Evyn Simpson MAIPS ’16, Jasmine Lambert MPA/MAIEP ’15, Jamie Stanton MPA ’16, Tom Stagg MPA ’16, and Slater Matzke MPA ’16— spent four days in Chicago interviewing the teams working in two neighborhoods, as well as collecting and analyzing data produced by the program.

 

Publications

›› Professor Moyara Ruehsen, whose areas of focus include money laundering and financial crime, teamed up with CNS Deputy Director Leonard Spector to coauthor a paper titled “Following the Proliferation Money” for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

›› Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies Program Chair Professor Jeffrey Knopf is the editor of International Cooperation on WMD Nonproliferation (University of Georgia Press, 2015), a new book examining international nonproliferation cooperation outside of the major treaties such as the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Prof. Knopf also wrote the introductory and concluding chapters in the volume, which grew out of a research project he directed. International Cooperation on WMD Nonproliferation is the first major study to systematically examine these other cooperative arrangements for limiting proliferation.

›› December graduate Muhammad Umer Khan MANPTS ’15 celebrated when his research paper “Tackling Nuclear and Radiological Terrorism in South Asia: India-Pakistan Joint Nuclear Detection Architecture” won the 2015 International Journal of Nuclear Security writing competition’s Award of Distinction in Policy, Law, and Diplomacy. As a result of this award, Khan’s paper, which started as a term paper in Professor George Moore’s class on nuclear forensics, will be published in the journal. Khan, who came to the Middlebury Institute with the goal of completing a certificate in nonproliferation studies, ended up earning a full master’s degree thanks to a generous scholarship from the Institute and CRDF Global.

For More Information

Eva Gudbergsdottir
evag@middlebury.edu
831-647-6606