Epstein to Direct AAAS Security Policy Center
[14 October 2009]
Gerald Epstein, a physicist and former White House science and security analyst, has joined AAAS as director of the Center for Science, Technology and Security Policy.

Policymakers working on security issues need ready access to the best scientific facts and thinking, and mechanisms for testing their own ideas against scientific and technological realities. There are many organizations with programs working on specific science and security issues, but none really serves an integrating or clearinghouse function across them. The institutions supported under the MacArthur Foundation Initiative, both in the United States and abroad, provide broad coverage of science and related security issues, but there is little communication and integration of activities among them. Unlocking the full potential of these centers to contribute to security policymaking requires a mechanism for linking them to each other and to the policy world.

AAAS has established this Center to fulfill that goal. The Center is guided by the over-arching goal of advancing the integration of science and public policy for national and international security. It approaches that goal by establishing communication links among scientists, policy analysts and policymakers. The Center will provide a portal through which the academic community and policy institutes, primarily those who are members of the MacArthur Initiative, can communicate with each other, and with policymakers and their staffs.

The Center will speed the delivery of balanced technical analysis to Congress, Executive Branch agencies and the public at large; serve to draw specialists into science and security policy by developing partnerships with the broad international network of leading universities, think-tanks, professional societies and nongovernmental organizations; and feed the interests of the policy community back to the academic community to help connect science with new security challenges and public priorities.

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