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SPUSA Board

The Board manages and oversees all operations of Student Pugwash USA, and its programs Student Pugwash and the Rotblat Society. Powers and authority are frequently delegated to committees and working groups running specific programs and projects, but the buck, as they say, stops here.

The Board currently has four positions. We have more information on why it's done this way.

  • Directors have ultimate authority, and can overrule actions taken by the rest of the Board.
  • Voting Advisors can vote on most Board roll call votes alongside Directors, in most situations, but do not have ultimate responsibility like Directors do.
  • Nonvoting Advisors are full participants in Board conversations and meetings, and receive all communications, but do not participate in roll call votes. (A straw poll of nonvoting advisors is usually taken.)
  • Corresponding Advisors are Board members in absentia, or experts providing their experience to the Board, who do not participate in its usual operations but may attend meetings for specific topics. 

The Board elects its own members. Nominations are usually open and members are invited to nominate themselves, each other, or others with skills and energy that will improve the leadership of the organization.

Ruben Aronin

Corresponding Advisor

Tony Bradshaw

Voting Advisor

Rick Bryant

Corresponding Advisor

Chuck Chung

Corresponding Advisor

Chuck is a key member of the Design, Test, & Integration team at AMFitzgerald, which designs and prototypes microelectromechanical systems for a wide variety of clients including scientific, medical, industrial, and aerospace companies. Chuck’s work has included wireless sensor nodes, implantable biosensors, microvalves, DNA sequencing chips, microphones, gyroscopes, accelerometers, and pressure sensors. Chuck holds three undergraduate science degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was also the nationally elected co-chair of the Student Pugwash network, a masters in Physics from Duke, and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech. More recently, he frequently holds his baby daughter, Andromeda.

Natalie Goldring

Advisor

David Guston

Director

David is co-director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes, Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies, and principal investigator and director of the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University. He also is co-PI on the Socio-Technical Integration Research (STIR) project and the To Think, To Write, To Publish project. David is widely published and cited on research and development policy, technology assessment, public participation in science and technology, and the politics of science policy. His book _Between Politics and Science: Assuring the Integrity and Productivity of Research_ was awarded the 2002 Don K. Price Prize by the American Political Science Association for best book in science and technology policy.

Rian Leith

Voting Advisor

Anna Peczeli

Corresponding Advisor

Jeff Porten

Director

Board Chair

Jeff is an independent IT consultant, entrepreneur, and author, who is sobered and gratified to have the least impressive biography in this document, and to be working with such extraordinary people. His professional work is with small businesses and nonprofits, during which he has daily experience putting ethical IT practices into effect, both for how he works with his clients (sadly, not a given in the field), and how he advises clients to treat their own customers. Throughout his career he has maintained interest and involvement in socially responsible organizations working on information policy. He has served multiple stints on the SPUSA Board and as its former elective student co-chair and board representative; other nonprofit positions have included advisory positions for the Federation of American Scientists and ISODARCO, the board of the World Federalist Movement, the board of the Kappa Alpha Literary Society, and the co-founder of “Noodle Club,” a networking venue for young nonprofit professionals in Washington, DC. In 1992, he became a member of “Senior” Pugwash when he was invited to a workshop conference in Nova Scotia, and later presented the agenda paper for his committee at the 1997 Pugwash quinquennial conference in Norway.

Victoria Powers

Corresponding Advisor

Aymerik Renard

Corresponding Advisor

Aymerik is General Partner focusing on North American investments at Hardware Club, a venture capital firm based in San Francisco, Paris, and Tokyo. His hardware expertise includes Internet of Things, wearable computing, connected consumer electronics, and mobile medical devices, following work growing companies innovating in email, VOIP, e-commerce, servers, predictive analytics, CRM, video technologies, security, and online gaming. He has lived in the US, Norway, Brazil, France, Scotland, England, China, and Singapore, and maintains a global network of professional colleagues.

Richard Rhiew

Corresponding Advisor

Rich graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1990 with a double major in Biology and Classical Studies. After graduation, Rich spent a year doing neuroscience research at Children’s Hospital in Boston. While in Boston he had the incredible opportunity of dancing with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane & Co.’s Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land. Rich graduated from Temple University School of Medicine in 1995. Rich completed an Internal Medicine residency at The University of Pittsburgh in 1998. He volunteered at the resident homeless clinic and helped create a guide for local behavioral health resources. He’s been in private practice since 1998 in New Jersey and Arizona, from a single specialty group with a focus on nursing home geriatric care to a multi specialty group and hospitalist-hybrid work. He served briefly as an associate medical director for a national hospice organization and is currently in a large primary care group in Tucson.

Jeffrey Rosenblum

Advisor

Carlo Schaerf

Corresponding Advisor

Carlo is retired as Professor of Physics at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata,” and co-founder and President of the International School on Disarmament and Research on Conflicts (ISODARCO), an independent NGO with headquarters in Rome and connected with the Italian Pugwash Group. Since 1966 ISODARCO has organized residential advanced courses and seminars on international security with particular attention to the risks of nuclear conflicts and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. An ISODARCO course invites scholars and experts to lecture on the problems of international security and admits 40-60 participants selected for their interest in the field. Participants include senior and graduate University students, junior and senior professionals and teachers, and members of civil society, all interested in playing a more active and technically competent role in their different professions and political activities. ISODARCO courses are organized with formal sessions, seminars, working groups and open discussions. Chairpersons are instructed to give priority during the discussions to student participants. Carlo has edited around 15 books on disarmament issues and around 10 on topics relevant to his professional activity as an experimentalist in the field of nuclear and elementary particles physics. He is the author of more than 100 articles in physics on refereed scientific journals and the principal investigator of a two-volume body of research on political violence in Italy supported by the Italian National Research Council (CNR).

Dann Sklarew

Varun Susarla

Advisor

Sherman Teichman

Advisor

Dirk Trojan

Director

Board Vice-Chair

Dirk is a management consultant and alumnus of Penn Student Pugwash. The scope of his corporate and freelance engagements include dispute resolution training and private/civil mediation, information privacy and breach response, corporate policy development, executive coaching, interim management, and technology commercialization and product feasibility. His clients and advisory roles include the Northern Alberta Business Incubator, the Alberta Science and Research Investments Program, Alberta Innovates Technology Futures, and the National Research Council (Canada). He is also an accomplished public speaker; his last talk, titled “Are Entrepreneurs Heroes or Fools?”, was given to a plenary session of a Canadian provincial high school STEM conference. He has served on the board of several nonprofit and community organizations, most recently the Patient-Centered Care and Steering Committee, and Co-Chair of the Family Advisory Council, at Alberta Children’s Hospital. An avid mountaineer and wilderness medic, he has recently shifted his risk exposure to maintaining the physical integrity of his local Cub Scout troop.

Daniel Wall

Corresponding Advisor

Shane Ward

Advisor

Shane is a recent graduate of Bates College, where he served as President for the United Nations Association of the United States of America, Bates College chapter. Originally from the UK, he has spent time with the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, DC. He is now working with The European-American Business Organization, Inc. in New York City as a transatlantic business development consultant before moving on to graduate studies.

His work and research have focused principally on transatlantic extended nuclear deterrence and nuclear modernization and policy in the United Kingdom. He presented on the latter at the 2021 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) PONI Fall Conference and is published in The Organization for World Peace (OWP) among others. As well as advising on the SPUSA board, he also serves on the board of International Student/Young Pugwash.

Talia Weiss

Advisor

Talia Weiss is a researcher in particle physics and technology ethics, currently pursuing a Physics PhD at Yale University, where her research centers on measuring the mass of a fundamental particle (that is, a basic building block of matter). Talia previously received an M.A. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and a B.S. in Physics from MIT. She created and co-leads the Yale Kimball Smith Series https://kimballsmithseries.yale.edu, an interdisciplinary event series on science, ethics and international affairs. Previously, she developed a similar program for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Talia has written and spoken on the history of scientific self-regulation, lessons learned from the case of Nazi nuclear physicists https://thebulletin.org/2019/07/scientific-blinders/, and how scientists who invented gene editing technologies viewed the ethics of their research. She is on the board of International Student/Young Pugwash.

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News and Updates

  • Pugwash Statement on the War in Ukraine
    02/28/2022 - 2:51pm
  • Ukraine and the future of arms control: A talk with Michael Krepon
    02/26/2022 - 4:51pm
  • Student/Young Pugwash UK Technology & Peace virtual conference
    02/09/2022 - 1:34pm
  • Reflections on the 2022 Doomsday Clock: It is 100 seconds to midnight
    02/01/2022 - 6:12pm
  • Reducing the Threat of Nuclear War: Rebuilding a Broader Movement
    01/23/2022 - 12:00am

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712 H St. NE
Suite 93149
Washington, DC 20002 USA

(202) 417-6450

contact@studentpugwash.org

Student Pugwash USA is a 501(c)3 organization registered in Washington, DC, USA.

© 2022 Student Pugwash USA. Explicitly named authors of contributed portions of the site retain copyright to their work. All rights reserved.

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