Experts
Lisbeth Gronlund
Senior Scientist & Co-Director, Global Security ProgramExpertise
Nuclear Weapons & Global Security-Missile DefenseProfile
Dr. Lisbeth Gronlund is a senior scientist and co-director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a research affiliate in the Program on Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cornell University.
Her research has focused on technical issues related to nuclear terrorism and fissile material controls, U.S. nuclear weapons policy and new nuclear weapons, space weapons, and ballistic missile defenses. She has published widely in scientific and policy journals, given numerous talks about nuclear arms control and missile defense policy issues to both lay and expert audiences, and testified to Congress. She is a co-author of a 2007 report, "Nuclear Power in a Warming World"; a 2005 report, "The Physics of Space Security: A Reference Manual," and a 2000 study, "Countermeasures: A Technical Analysis of the Operational Effectiveness of the Planned US National Missile Defense System."
Dr. Gronlund is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physics Society (APS). She is the co-recipient of the 2001 Joseph A. Burton Forum Award of the APS "for creative and sustained leadership in building an international arms-control-physics community and for her excellence in arms control physics."
She helped establish and is a primary organizer of the International Summer Symposiums on Science and World Affairs, which each year since 1989 have brought together some 40 young scientists working on international security issues from different countries. These meetings are designed to help foster a new—and in some countries, a first—generation of independent scientists with expertise in arms control and security issues and to create an international community of technical researchers working on these issues.
Before joining the Union of Concerned Scientists in 1992, Dr. Gronlund was an SSRC-MacArthur Foundation Fellow in International Peace and Security at the Center for International Security Studies at the University of Maryland and a postdoctoral fellow at the MIT Defense and Arms Control Studies Program.
