My office, the Office of the Science Adviser to the Secretary of State, was established in 2000 in response to an NRC study that highlighted the attrition of scientists from State Department ranks at a time when the importance of science and technology was expanding in every aspect of foreign policy. Under the leadership of the first Adviser, Dr. Norman Neureiter, the number of active scientists in the department began to grow again as he promoted the expansion of the AAAS Science Diplomacy Fellows program. (Parenthetically I’d like to tell you that Norm is the recipient of this year’s Public Welfare Medal of the National Academy of Sciences, in significant measure recognizing his work in the State Department). Today we have roughly 30 new AAAS Fellows joining us every year for 1-2 years of service. So let me bring this to life by introducing you to a couple of AAS fellows – what they’ve done and what they are doing.

Dr. Jason Rao was trained as a molecular biologist at the Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Rao came to the State Department as one of this wonderful cadre of AAAS Science Diplomacy Fellows and went to work in the Cooperative Threat Reduction Office. As a biologist, Dr. Rao focused on facilities in the Former Soviet Union that had been engaged in producing biological weapons. His Bioindustry Initiative (Slide 18) funds large-scale projects in Russia, Georgia, and Kazakhstan to transform facilities previously engaged in producing organisms for biological warfare to institutes that enhance public health capacity in vaccine production, research and development, and disease surveillance. You might not think that all these diverse threads would reassemble, but they do. The Nunn-Lugar funds continue to support some of the programs of the State Department’s Cooperative Threat Reduction Office and CRDF is involved in their implementation.