Center for Nonproliferation Studies Welcomes Largest Group of Students Yet to Summer Undergraduate Internship Program

This summer, the Monterey Institute’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) welcomed a group of very promising undergraduate students, including nine summer interns and two Davis United World College (UWC) fellows, to its Summer Undergraduate Internship in Nonproliferation Studies program.

All were selected through a very competitive application process. The nine summer interns are from Middlebury College, Brown University, Occidental College, the University of California, Berkeley, and Scripps College. The two Davis UWC fellows are from Middlebury College and Brown University. Their majors include political science, peace and conflict studies, Middle Eastern studies, diplomacy and world affairs, and philosophy.

As part of its mission to combat the spread of weapons of mass destruction by educating the next generation of nonproliferation experts, CNS started the summer undergraduate internship program in 1997, and the Davis UWC Fellowship in Nonproliferation Studies was established in 2006. From the inception of each program, interns and Davis UWC fellows at CNS have come from a wide variety of majors, including biology, international relations, East Asian studies, nuclear engineering, mathematics, political science, and peace studies. Students have come from a diverse number of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., including Brown University, Yale University, Stanford University, Claremont McKenna College, Harvard University, Columbia University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In addition to assigned research work, interns and Davis UWC fellows have an opportunity to develop their own research projects under the guidance of CNS experts. As part of the training aspect of the internship program, they will attend seminars and lectures in the field of nonproliferation, arms control and disarmament given by CNS experts throughout the summer.

This year, CNS invited Dr. Tariq Rauf, a former high-ranking official at the International Atomic Energy Agency with extensive experience in nonproliferation and disarmament field, to be a special lecturer in the program. His lecture series thoroughly covers international nonproliferation and disarmament regimes, and challenges facing them. The duration of the internship and fellowship is two to three months between early June and late August.