Associate Dean Jonathan Gifford will participate as part of a panel discussion at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation event: Smart Roads, Smart Cars: How IT is Transforming Transportation. The panel will discuss policies Congress and the Administration can consider for IT to enhance mobility, transportation safety, and positively affect the environment. The May 14th event takes place at the Capitol Visitor Center in Washington, DC. Audio and video from the event will be available online on May 19.

Professor Wayne D. Perry presented “Will Nuclear Arms Reduction Policy Deter or Dissuade Proliferation?: New Multi-Player Models May Help Structure the Answer” at the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center conference, What Is Needed?: The Way Ahead for WMD Policy, at George Mason University’s Arlington Campus on April 16.

Perry also presented, with coauthors SPP PhD student David Coleman and Mason School of Management Professor Allen Hughes, the paper “The Role of Data Governance to Relieve Information Sharing Impairments in the Federal Government” at the 2009 IEEE World Congress on Computer Science and Information Engineering, in Los Angeles on April 1.

On March 28 to 29 in Las Vegas, Perry participated in the Teaching the Nuclear Age Institute, which was sponsored by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the American Academy of Diplomacy, and the Atomic Testing Museum.

Professor Jack Goldstone presented “Responding to Deterioration in Fragile and Conflict-Affected States” at the World Bank’s Headline Seminar for senior bank management on April 8. Goldstone was one of a dozen experts invited to address the bank’s leaders on how to identify and respond to deterioration in political stability. Other presenters were Gareth Evans, president of the International Crisis Group and former foreign minister of Australia; Ed Luck, International Peace Institute and special advisor to the UN secretary general; and Alvaro de Soto, former UN assistant secretary-general. Also attending were Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, managing director of the World Bank; Jeffrey Gutman, vice president for operations policy at the bank; and Alastair McKechnie, the bank’s director for fragile and conflict-affected countries.

PhD student Jim Szymalak presented “Are Conservative Protestant Beliefs within the U.S. Military and Political Leadership Impeding the Effectiveness of U.S. Counterinsurgency Strategies?” at the Midwest Political Science Association annual national conference on April 2 in Chicago.