News & Announcements

Matthew Meselson, a driving force behind the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), has received the $50,000 Future of Life Award for his successful efforts to ban biological weapons – one of the most inhumane forms of warfare known to humanity. The award was presented on April 9 during the Keynote Ceremony of the Conference of World Affairs at the University of Colorado, Boulder. April 9 marked the eve of the 47th anniversary of the signing of the BWC.

As an international historian, Odd Arne Westad may be best known for bringing a fresh interpretation to the Cold War in which he argues that the era began much earlier and extended much farther than popularly thought.

Those and other themes are explored in detail in a comprehensive new history of the Cold War written by Westad, the S.T. Lee Professor of U.S.-Asia Relations at Harvard, where he teaches at the Kennedy School.

The American Energy Society has named the Belfer Center’s Meghan O’Sullivan the 2017 “Energy Writer of the Year.” O’Sullivan, the Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and Director of the Belfer Center's Geopolitics of Energy Project, received the prestigious award for her recently published book Windfall: How the New Energy Abundance Upends Global Politics and Strengthens America’s Power and for her New York Times commentary “How Trump Can Harness the U.S. Energy Boom.”

Former Deputy Secretary of Energy Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall is joining Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs as a Senior Fellow, the Center announced today. Sherwood-Randall, who has served in the White House and Departments of Energy and Defense, is returning to the Center where she worked in the 1990s to help establish two pioneering projects – the Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project with Graham Allison, who this month stepped down as the Center’s director, and the Preventive Defense Project with Ash Carter, the former Secretary of Defense who is the new Belfer Center director.

Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, former Deputy Secretary of Energy who has served in high-level positions at the White House and Pentagon, joined Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center as a non-resident Senior Fellow in July. Sherwood-Randall is returning to the Kennedy School where she previously collaborated with Ash Carter, the Belfer Center’s newly appointed director, and Graham Allison, who stepped down as Center director this month. We asked Sherwood-Randall to give us some background on her Harvard connections, why she returned, and what she hopes to accomplish as a Senior Fellow.

NPR's Ari Shapiro talks to Farah Pandith, senior fellow with the Future of Diplomacy Project and adjunct fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, about the evolution of presidential rhetoric on acts of terrorism and the groups that perpetrate them.