As soon as Paul Doty launched what is now Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in 1974, he began planning a scholarly journal on international security. He shrugged off colleagues’ concerns that there would be little market for such a journal.Thirty-six years after the first issue appeared in the summer of 1976, the Belfer Center’s quarterly International Security consistently ranks No. 1 or No. 2 out of over 70 international affairs journals surveyed by Thomson Reuters each year.

Paul Doty founded what is now the Belfer Center in 1974 and was an active participant in Center activities until a few weeks before his death on December 5, 2011. He was 91. Steven Miller, a member of Doty’s early staff and current director of the Center’s International Security Program and editor-in-chief of International Security journal, remembers his colleague and friend.

Paul Doty, the founder of the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, died today at the age of 91.



Paul Doty devoted his life to harnessing science for peaceful and productive service to mankind, and averting nuclear war.

On June 3, 2010, current and former members of Harvard University's Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, gathered at Harvard's Eliot House to celebrate PAUL DOTY's 90th birthday. This event, which followed Harvard's 2010 Paul Doty Lecture, included numerous stories and praise for Doty, who founded what is now the Belfer Center and the Molecular and Cellular Biology department. (This is a transcript of the comments at the shevent.)

We celebrate Paul Doty, founder and director emeritus of the Belfer Center and member of our board of directors, as well as emeritus professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School and Mallinckrodt Professor of Biochemistry, emeritus, at Harvard. We share a snapshot of Paul's life and his contributions to science and international security. At 90, he continues his outstanding contributions to the Belfer Center and global community through his ongoing research, insights, and guidance.

Paul Doty is the founder and director emeritus of the Belfer Center, emeritus member of the Center's Board of Directors, and emeritus professor of public policy at the Kennedy School. However, most of his professional life has been as professor of biochemistry in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences where he founded the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 1968.

On November 17, 1986 Paul Doty participated in an extended interview with the Chemical Heritage Foundation's about his life, interests and opinions on subjects ranging from science and technology to international security and nuclear non-proliferation.