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 Philipp Bleek is a Ph.D. candidate in international relations in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. He recently taught an advanced undergraduate seminar on nuclear weapons policy and politics at Georgetown, and has also been an instructor in the Department of Defense Senior Leader Development Program for rising mid-career civilians. Next year, he will be a fellow at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, where he will complete his dissertation. He served on President Obama's nonproliferation policy advisory team during the 2008 campaign.
Bleek has been a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a non-resident fellow at the Center for a New American Security, where he worked with former Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig on bioterrorism policy. He has also been a research analyst at the Arms Control Association, and began his professional work on nuclear nonproliferation as a Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellow. He is currently a fellow of the Truman National Security Project.
Bleek has published on nuclear weapons issues through the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Harvard University, among others, and has briefed on nuclear issues at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, U.S. Strategic Command in Omaha, and to government and non-governmental analysts in New Delhi, India, among others. He holds a master in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a bachelor of arts from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
 Jasdave Chahal is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. His current research focuses on elucidating the mechanism by which E1B-mutant adenoviruses such as ONYX-15 and H101 selectively destroy tumor cells. The success of these oncolytic viral therapies was long thought to be due to the altered p53 status of cancer cells, but recently the role of p53 in determining the efficacy of adenoviral therapies has been called into question.
Chahal is studying the interaction of the mutant virus with other cellular complexes, such as DNA repair systems, to determine the basis of the selective replication of the virus in tumor cell lines. He currently holds a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada graduate fellowship and has won awards previously for summer research at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute his senior year of college and later for excellence in teaching at Princeton. In the future he hopes to further extend his research into viruses as platforms for cancer and gene therapies, and combine them with existing designer nuclease technology to create programmable tools for the deliberate manipulation of animal genomes. Chahal earned his B.Sc. in Biopharmaceutical Science with option in Genomics from the University of Ottawa in 2006, graduating summa cum laude and with honors.
 David Diaz is a master’s candidate in the Negotiation, Conflict Resolution, and Peacebuilding program at California State University Dominguez Hills. He is currently working for the Spanish Ministry of Education in Madrid, Spain. As a concurrent project, Diaz is working with Spanish experts to develop a Peace Education project for the Basque Country. His research interests include poverty alleviation and strategic education as means of both countering and preventing terrorism. In addition, he has a profound interest in the areas of globalization, behavior modification, and identity management. Diaz will be lecturing this summer at the 8th annual Euro-Mediterranean meeting in the areas of Identity and Conflict and Post-Conflict Development.
Diaz received his B.A. in international security and conflict resolution (ISCOR) with a specialization in cooperation, conflict, and conflict resolution from San Diego State University in 2006. He also holds an A.A. in political science from Southwestern College (2004), and is certified in diversity management by that same institution. Additionally, Diaz has studied at Moscow State University and at East Mediterranean University in Famagusta, Cyprus. Prior to moving to Spain he worked at the Institute of the Americas with their Information and Communication Technologies programs.
 Alison Hottes is a postdoctoral research fellow in Prof. Saeed Tavazoie’s lab at Princeton University. She works in the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, where her research interests include bacterial adaptation, the genetic basis of antibiotic susceptibility, and comparative genomics. Hottes is also interested in the role science plays in shaping public policy and in how decision makers use scientific information. She is currently studying interactions between antibiotic resistance and biofilm formation in Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an opportunistic bacterial pathogen.
Prior to moving to Princeton University, Hottes received a M.S. (2000) and a Ph.D. (2005) in electrical engineering from Stanford University. Her doctoral thesis analyzed the transcriptional controls present in the metabolic and cell cycle networks of the bacterium Caulobacter crescentus. Hottes has published original research articles in the Journal of Bacteriology, Molecular Microbiology, PLoS One, Nature Biotechnology, Proceeding of the National Academy of Science (USA), and the EMBO Journal. Hottes graduated from Utah State University with a B.S. in electrical engineering and mathematics in 1998.
Karl Kruse is a third-year Ph.D. student at UC Irvine studying the interaction of government and private enterprise in the security sector. His current work focuses on the difficulties associated with international cooperation on security issues when private firms are involved. He has examined cases of interstate cooperation and confrontation involving industries ranging from energy to consulting, to private military firms. He is a fellow at UC Irvine’s Center for the Study of Democracy and an affiliate of the Center for Peace and Global Conflict Studies and the Center for Research in International and Global Studies. He has traveled extensively in Asia in conjunction with his research. He would like to use his background to produce research that helps policy makers better oversee and make use of the growing capabilities of the private sector.
 Jennifer Liu is a recent graduate of the UCSF–UC Berkeley Joint Program in Medical Anthropology. She is the Freeman Postdoctoral Fellow in Chinese Science and Technology in the Department of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has conducted field research in Taiwan and California on stem cell research and bioethics. Her current research focuses on biomedical technologies, biobanks, and ethics, with a specific interest in how certain diseases and biological collections articulate with notions of identity and ethnicity.
 Adrianna Muir is an environmental fellow at the California Research Bureau, a non-partisan department of the California State Library that provides information upon request to the Executive and Legislative branches of state government. Muir is currently researching gaps in policy that address the prevention and management of aquatic invasive species along the coast of California.
Muir received her Ph.D. in ecology from UC Davis in May 2009. Her dissertation research focused on the invasion of a grass species in the threatened California coastal prairie and the mechanisms that caused the invasive plant to displace some native species while coexisting with others. In addition, Muir participated in an NSF-sponsored interdisciplinary group project on introductions of invasive species through the horticulture and aquarium trades.
Prior to moving to California, Muir received her B.S. from Tufts University and worked in a variety of environmental conservation capacities, including ecological consulting and rare plant conservation.
 April Ross is currently a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Group of Immunology at UC Davis. She conducts research at the Center for Health and the Environment in Dr. Kent E. Pinkerton’s laboratory. Her focus is studying the pulmonary effects of perinatal co-exposure to environmental toxicants and infectious agents (A/PR8 influenza virus) on the offspring immune system and its ability to mount an effective response in the mouse model. Her research path has been driven by the epidemiological impact of cigarette smoke exposure in children and susceptibility to infectious diseases. She is currently a NIH/NHBLI Research Service Award (T32) Predoctoral Fellow.
Ross received her B.S. in zoology at Iowa State University in 2002. Her undergraduate research in Dr. Clark Ford’s laboratory focused on the genetic engineering of the enzyme glucoamylase to increase its thermostability. She received a M.S. in immunology at UC Davis under Dr. Kent Pinkerton where she studied the effect of environmental tobacco smoke on airway epithelium and lymphocyte infiltration in the non-human primate lung. She is aspiring to transition her research strengths and scientific information into a presentable form to aid in the brain-storming and implementation of regulatory measures.
 Aisha P. Salazar is a Ph.D. candidate in food science at Kansas State University. She is conducting multidisciplinary research on food safety and security, agroterrorism, trade policy, border security, and geographic information systems. Her research focuses on the development of a veterinary medical intelligence template and on the international trade concept of regionalization, which allows countries to continue trading from disease-free areas while recovering from a disease epidemic.
Salazar is a researcher in the Frontier program—a joint program between Kansas State University and New Mexico State University. As a participant, she conducted field research at the U,S,-Mexico border during the summer of 2007. During that same year, she traveled to Mexico as part of former Governor Kathleen Sebelius’s Kansas trade mission to promote Kansas beef, serving as a representative addressing food safety issues. Prior to pursuing her Ph.D., Salazar gained experience in open-source analysis while working on Project Argus—an event-detection biosurveillance program based at Georgetown University’s Imaging Science and Information Systems Center.
Salazar received Bachelor of Science degrees in biology and psychology from Virginia Tech in 2004. She received her Master of Science in Biohazardous Threat Agents and Emerging Infectious Diseases from Georgetown University in 2006. She hopes to work internationally to prevent infectious diseases from threatening agricultural and public health.
 Dr. Alvin Smith is a postdoctoral research fellow currently conducting research at the National Institutes of Health, Center for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases in the laboratory of Dr. Peter Jahrling, director of the NIH Integrated Research Facility. Smith uses novel routes of inoculation while studying emerging infectious diseases in high-containment laboratories. Currently, his research focuses extensively on viral immunology using non-human primate and mouse models in order to elucidate viral pathogenesis and drug efficacy against orthopoxviruses.
Smith received his Ph.D. in microbiology from Howard University in in 2007 while training at the Vaccine Research Center under Dr. Gary Nabel. During this time, his work focused on the characterization of intracellular proteins responsible for trafficking internalized HIV-1 via dendritic cell C-type lectin receptors to T cell junctions. Data generated has had significant implications for understanding the trans-enhancement of T cell infection by DCs, potentially leading to new mechanisms of blocking HIV-1 transfer.
Prior to his graduate work, Smith worked with Merck Research Laboratories as a member of a team that optimized initial cloning techniques for the Merck HIV-1 vaccine using the adenovirus vector platform. Smith is also a graduate of Talladega College, where he received his bachelor’s degree in biology in 2001.
Smith wants to integrate his extensive training in virology and biodefense with public policy making an impact on biothreat reduction within the global community.
 Matt Zimmerman is a Ph.D. student in UC Davis's Graduate Group in
Ecology with an emphasis in human ecology and environmental policy. His
research focus is formal modeling of cooperation and conflict in international relations, policy institutions, terrorism and warfare. He is especially interested in how cultural similarities and differences influence the decision-making process in warfare. Zimmerman earned his B.S. in bological and environmental engineering and M.P.S. in environmental management from Cornell University.
After graduation Zimmerman spent six years as a United States Air Force officer. In his last assignment, he served as Eielson AFB's Emergency Management and Readiness Flight Commander where he led 15 personnel in running the installation's Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and High-Yield Explosives (CBRNE) defense program, managed the installation's Emergency Operations Center, updated emergency response plans (including those for terrorist WMD attacks) to comply with NIMS, helped integrate Eielson's pandemic response planning with the local communities, participated in community-wide biological response training exercises, and maintained training, plans, detection equipment and procedures to respond to specific CBRNE threats on the Korean peninsula. Zimmerman was recently named a Chancellor's Teaching Fellow to instruct an introductory course on terrorism and warfare.
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