Since October 2009, Dr. Gerald Epstein has been Director of the Center for Science, Technology and Security Policy of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society. He previously served as Senior Fellow for Science and Security in the Homeland Security Program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he worked on issues including reducing and countering biological weapons threats, improving relations between the scientific research and national security communities, and examining the role of technology in homeland security.

Dr. Epstein has taught “Science, Technology, and Homeland Security” as an adjunct faculty member of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He came to CSIS in 2003 from the Institute for Defense Analyses, where he had been assigned to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. From 1996 to 2001, he worked at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), serving for the last year in a joint appointment as Assistant Director for National Security at OSTP and Senior Director for Science and Technology on the National Security Council staff. His responsibilities included technologies to counter terrorism and to protect the nation’s critical infrastructures; chemical and biological weapons nonproliferation and arms control; missile defense; strategic arms control; the nuclear weapon stockpile stewardship program; export controls; and national security/emergency preparedness telecommunications.

From 1983 to 1989 and again from 1991 until its demise in 1995, Dr. Epstein worked at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, where he directed a study on the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and worked on other international security topics. From 1989 to 1991, he directed a project at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government on the relationship between civil and military technologies, and he is a co-author of the resulting publication Beyond Spinoff: Military and Commercial Technologies in a Changing World (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1992). He has also served as visiting lecturer in public and international affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School.

Dr. Epstein is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2007 he chaired the American Physical Society’s Committee on International Scientific Affairs. He also serves on the Biological Threats Panel of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on International Security and Arms Control and on the Biological Sciences Experts Group for the Director of National Intelligence. He is currently a member of the editorial board for the journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism and has completed terms on the Executive Committee of the American Physical Society’s Forum on Physics and Society and on the Advisory Board of the American Chemical Society’s publication Chemical and Engineering News. He received S.B. degrees in physics and electrical engineering from MIT, has done research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at Berkeley.