His introduction to national security began at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a federally-funded research and development center supporting the Office of the Secretary of Defense with studies and analyses, where he evaluated new technologies for defense applications, and supported the START and INF Treaty negotiations.

Dr. Oelrich left IDA for a one-year fellowship at the Center for Science and International Affairs, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, where he wrote on conventional arms control limits. On his return to Washington, DC, he accepted a position as a senior analyst at the Office of Technology Assessment, an agency of the U.S. Congress where he investigated the needs of the military industrial base and wrote a treatise on friendly fire prompted by experience in the Persian Gulf War.

Returning to IDA, Dr. Oelrich focused on environmental restoration of lands belonging to the U.S. Departments of Defense and Energy, characterizing the cleanup liability, evaluating innovative cleanup technologies, calculating the economic benefits of environmental laboratory automation and developing administrative procedures for the long term environmental stewardship of military lands. He also provided technical support to the negotiating team of the land mine arms control treaty.

Dr. Oelrich focused on emerging nuclear threats at the Advanced Systems and Concepts Office of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency where he supported General Shalikashvili's review of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. He returned to IDA for one year before joining the Federation of American Scientists, where he focuses on issues related to nuclear testing and the testing moratorium, proliferation of nuclear weapons and nuclear materials, the structure of future US nuclear forces, and sizing conventional military forces in the post-Cold War world.

Dr. Oelrich received his BS from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from Princeton University, both in chemistry. He was a pre-doctoral Research Associate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He also conducted research in nuclear physics and taught in the Physics Department of the Technical University of Munich in Germany.