The 2012 Policy@Tech series kicked off January 24th with a seminar featuring Sam Nunn School of International Affairs Assistant Professor Margaret E. Kosal and College of Engineering Professor Rob Butera on "Biotechnology and National Security: the Role of the Scientist/Engineer in Washington."

Both professors have experience serving in different parts of the US Government involved in reducing the threat of emerging technologies and biotechnology specifically, and provided a government view of biosecurity issues.

Kosal, who served as Science and Technology Advisor in the Office of the Secretary of Defense as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science and Technology Fellow, spoke about efforts to create, implement, and execute programs to fund and develop revolutionary countermeasures against genetically-engineered and emerging biological threats within the Department of Defense. She emphasized the criticality of institutional and organizational structures in success or failure of such efforts over anything intrinsically linked to scientific research.

Butera, who served in the Department of State’s Office of Chemical and Biological Weapon Threat Reduction as a Jefferson Science Fellow, spoke about his experiences serving on a high-level inter-governmental group seeking to develop policies related to screening of gene sequences as part of an emerging technology sector. He also noted the focus of most scientific professional societies and how the activities of those groups can have implications for research scientists and engineers.

This seminar series is part of the Institute-wide initiative to bring together the five policy research centers at Georgia Tech, including the Center for International Strategy, Technology, and Policy (www.cistp.gatech.edu), to form a consortium called Policy@Tech (www.iac.gatech.edu/research/policy-at-tech). Professors Kosal and Butera have been funded by GT-FIRE on a project, on “Educating a Biotechnology Policy & Security Workforce.”