Nuclear security expert Charles D. Ferguson will present a MillerComm Lecture March 7 on the Urbana campus.
Ferguson, president of the Federation of American Scientists and co-chair of the U.S.-Japan Nuclear Working Group, will discuss expanding the concept of security from military defense to the assurance of adequate energy, food and water around the world in a lecture entitled “Leveraging Science and Technology to Transform International Security: The Social Responsibility of Engineers and Scientists.” Sponsored by the Center for Advanced Study, the lecture will be at 7:30 p.m., in the Knight Auditorium at the Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Charles D. Ferguson
Ferguson has written four books, most recently Nuclear Energy: What Everyone Needs to Know. In 2008, he made Wired magazine’s “Smart List” as one of the “Fifteen People the Next President Should Listen To.”
Ferguson has been the president of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) since January 1, 2010. Ten years ago, he worked for FAS on nuclear proliferation and arms control issues as a senior research analyst and director of the nuclear policy project.
At the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), he served as the project director of the Independent Task Force on U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy. In addition to his work at CFR, where he specialized in arms control, climate change, energy policy, and nuclear and radiological terrorism, Ferguson also is an adjunct professor in the security studies program at Georgetown University.
From 2002 to 2004, Ferguson had been with the Monterey Institute’s Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) as its scientist-in-residence. While there he co-authored the book, The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism.
He was lead author of the January 2003 report “Commercial Radioactive Sources: Surveying the Security Risks,” assessing the radiological dispersal device, or “dirty bomb,” threat after the 9/11 terrorist attack. This report won the 2003 Robert S. Landauer Lecture Award from the Health Physics Society.
Ferguson also has consulted with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and the National Nuclear Security Administration. From 2000 to 2002, he served as a physical scientist in the Office of the Senior Coordinator for Nuclear Safety at the U.S. Department of State, where he helped develop U.S. government policies on nuclear safety and security issues.
Ferguson earned his undergraduate degree in physics from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, then served as an officer on a fleet ballistic missile submarine and studied nuclear engineering at the Naval Nuclear Power School. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees, also in physics, from Boston University in Massachusetts.
