Alexander Bick is associate professor of practice in public policy in the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia and a Faculty Senior Fellow at the Miller Center. He brings more than twenty years of experience in national security policy and research, including senior roles in the U.S. government, non-profit organizations, and academic institutions.

Bick served as director for strategic planning at the National Security Council during the first year of the Biden administration. In that role, he led the “Tiger Team” charged with planning the U.S. response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and helped to craft the 2022 National Security Strategy, the overarching strategic framework for U.S. national security and foreign policy. Later, he served as a senior advisor and member of the Secretary’s Policy Planning staff at the U.S. Department of State. There he earned a Superior Honor Award for his work conceiving and co-directing an initiative to improve the Department’s ability to anticipate and plan for major global crises.

Earlier in his career, Bick served at the State Department and the White House in the Obama administration, where he focused on the Middle East and North Africa and played a key role developing the U.S. strategy to defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Before entering government, he worked for former U.S. President Jimmy Carter on elections and peace initiatives in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Venezuela, and Libya, and as a researcher on development policy in the UK Parliament.

A historian by training, Bick previously taught at Barnard College and Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where he helped to establish the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs. He has held research fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the University of Leiden, where he was a Fulbright Fellow. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Minutes of Empire, which explores the relationship between conquest, company, and state in the Dutch Republic on the eve of the Treaty of Westphalia. Bick graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Chicago with a BA in political science. He received a diploma in economics and an MSc in economic history from the London School of Economics and a PhD in history from Princeton.

Dr. Brown is Founding Director of the Data Science Institute, the W.S. Calcott Professor of the Department of Systems and Information Engineering and Co-Director of the Translational Health Institute of Virginia, University of Virginia. Prior to joining the University of Virginia, Dr. Brown served as an officer in the U.S. Army and later worked at Vector Research, Inc. on projects in medical information processing and multi-sensor surveillance systems. He is now President of Commonwealth Computer Research, Inc. which provides data analysis and technical services for numerous private and governmental organizations. He serves on the National Research Council Committee on Transportation Security has served on the National Academy of Sciences panel on High Performance Computing and Crisis Management and on the NRC Committee on Surface Transportation Infrastructure Security. He is a past member of the Joint Directors of Laboratories Group on Data Fusion and a former Fellow at the National Institute of Justice Crime Mapping Research Center.

Dr. Brown has been a principal investigator or co-principal investigator for over 90 research contracts with federal, state, and private organizations. He has over 120 published papers and two edited books. His research focuses on data fusion, knowledge discovery, and predictive modeling with applications to security and safety.

Dr. Brown is a Fellow of the IEEE and a past President of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society. He is the recipient of the Norbert Wiener Award for Outstanding Research in the areas of systems engineering, data fusion, and information analysis. He has also received an Outstanding Contribution Award from that society and the IEEE Millennium Medal. The student chapter of the International Council on Systems Engineering has named him the best undergraduate teacher three years in a row (2001, 2002, and 2003). He is the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transaction on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans . He has served on the administrative committee of the IEEE Neural Networks Council. He is coeditor of the books, Operations Research and Artificial Intelligence: The Integration of Problem Solving Strategies and Intelligent Scheduling Systems. He is also past-Chairman of the Operations Research Society of America Technical Section on Artificial Intelligence and he is the recipient of the Outstanding Service Award from that Society. Dr. Brown’s students have won competitions in the Omega Rho honor society, the IEEE, the Brunswick Society, and the Operations Research Society of America.

John Robinson is the NSPC’s Director of Academic Programs. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses focused on national security, including Innovating for Defense, an experiential course that pairs student teams with sponsors from the Department of Defense (DoD) to solve real-world national security problems. His research interests include international security and naval affairs. John holds a Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Virginia, and a M.A. from the U.S. Naval War College.

Alison Criss is an Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Cancer Biology in the School of Medicine. Dr. Criss’s laboratory investigates how pathogenic microorganisms manipulate the immune system in order to cause disease, focusing on the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae, an antibiotic-resistant “superbug” that infects hundreds of millions of people worldwide each year. The ultimate goal of this research is to identify targets in the host or pathogen for developing vaccines and new antimicrobial drugs, while preventing sterility and other negative outcomes associated with the inflammatory response to infection. This research is supported by the National Institutes of Health and local and statewide sources of funding. Dr. Criss’ honors include the American Society for Microbiology / Interscience Conference for Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy Young Investigator Award, the School of Medicine Dean’s Awards for Excellence in Research and in Teaching, election to the UVA Academy of Distinguished Educators, and selection as a UVA Pinn Scholar. At UVA, Dr. Criss serves on the Executive Committee of the NIH-sponsored Infectious Diseases Training Grant and the Advisory Committee for the Biomedical Data Sciences Training Grant. She serves on the editorial boards of several journals, was editor of the Thematic Issue on Pathogenic Neisseria in the journal Pathogens and Disease (2017), has been on organizing committees of international scientific conferences, and is Chair of the 2019 Mid-Atlantic Microbial Pathogenesis Meeting. Criss Lab Website

Jack W. Davidson is a Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia. He joined the faculty in 1981 after receiving his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Arizona. Professor Davidson’s research interests include compilers, computer security, programming languages, computer architecture, and embedded systems. He is the principal investigator on several ongoing grants to develop comprehensive methods for protecting software from malicious attacks.

Professor Davidson is a Fellow of the ACM and a Senior Member of the IEEE Computer Society. He served as an Associate Editor of ACM’s Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems for six years, and as an Associate Editor of ACM’s Transactions on Architecture and Compiler Optimizations for eight years. He served as Chair of ACM’s Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) from 2005 to 2007. He currently serves on the ACM Executive Council and is co-chair of ACM’s Publication Board that oversees all aspects of ACM’s publications and the operation of ACM’s Digital Library.

Professor Davidson is co-author of two best-selling introductory programming textbooks, C++ Program Design: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming, 3rd edition and Java 5.0 Program Design: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming, 2nd edition. He and his colleague, James P. Cohoon, received the 2008 IEEE Taylor L. Booth Award for their sustained effort to transform introductory computer science education.

Ashley Deeks joined the Law School in 2012 as an associate professor of law after two years as an academic fellow at Columbia Law School. Her primary research and teaching interests are in the areas of international law, national security, intelligence and the laws of war. She has written articles on the use of force, executive power, secret treaties, the intersection of national security and international law, and the laws of armed conflict. She is a member of the State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Law and the American Law Institute, and she serves as a contributing editor to the Lawfare blog. Deeks also recently served as White House associate counsel and deputy legal adviser to the National Security Council while on leave from the Law School. She is a senior fellow at the Lieber Institute for Law and Land Warfare, and a faculty senior fellow at the Miller Center.

Kirsten Gelsdorf is a professor of practice in public policy and Co-Director of the UVA Humanitarian Collaborative in the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. Gelsdorf has 19 years of experience working in the humanitarian sector, most recently serving as the Chief of the Policy Analysis and Innovation section at the United Nations Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Harry Harding is university professor emeritus and professor emeritus of public policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, a senior fellow in the Miller Center of Public Affairs at UVA, and Adjunct Chair Professor in the College of Social Science at National Chengchi University in Taipei, where he holds a Yushan Scholarship. Harding is a specialist on Asia and U.S. – Asian relations.

David Leblang is a professor of public policy at the Batten School, the Ambassador Henry J. Taylor and Mrs Marion R. Taylor Endowed Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia, and the Randolph Compton Professor of Public Affairs at UVA’s Miller Center. Leblang is a scholar of political economy with research interests in global migration and in the politics of financial markets.

After earning his undergraduate degree in history and economics, Tom Nachbar spent five years as a systems analyst, working for both Andersen Consulting and Hughes Space and Communications before entering law school, where he served on the University of Chicago Law Review and was elected to the Order of the Coif. After graduation, he clerked for Judge Frank H. Easterbrook of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and later practiced with what is now Mayer Brown in Chicago as a member of the firm’s appellate litigation, information technology and intellectual property practice groups.

Nachbar’s research focuses on the constitutional dimensions of trade regulation. His early work addressed how the availability of new technologies challenged the divide between public and private alternatives to regulation; this work grew into a focus on the relationship between public and private control of markets as expressed in the federal antitrust laws. He has written extensively on the history of trade regulation, from mercantilist England through 20th-century America. His work ranges from study of common law, common-carriage obligations to the use of antitrust laws to regulate internet platforms and other multi-sided markets and the role of economic analysis in antitrust law. He has written several articles on the constitutional dimensions of antitrust law and trade regulation, the Supreme Court’s constitutional equal protection and due process jurisprudence, and, building on his background as a programmer and systems analyst, the legal implications of algorithms and artificial intelligence. He has both practiced and published in the field of telecommunications law (he authored, with Glen Robinson, the casebook “Communications Regulation”).

Nachbar also works in national security. He has written and taught on a wide variety of national security law topics, including the role of law in counterinsurgency, the law of detention and war crimes. He is a judge advocate in the U.S. Army Reserve, where he has, among other assignments, edited an Army handbook on the development of legal systems, trained Palestinian security forces in the West Bank and deployed to Iraq as a forward headquarters legal adviser. His current Reserve assignment is as associate dean of the Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School. He is a senior fellow with the University’s Miller Center of Public Affairs and is affiliated with the Law School’s National Security Law Center and the National Security Policy Center at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy.

John M. Owen IV is Amb. Henry J. and Mrs. Marion R. Taylor Professor of Politics, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and the Miller Center for Public Affairs.  His latest book is The Ecology of Nations: American Democracy in a Fragile World Order (Yale, 2023).  He is author Confronting Political Islam: Six Lessons from the West’s Past (Princeton, 2014), of The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change, 1510-2010 (Princeton, 2010), and of Liberal Peace, Liberal War: American Politics and International Security (Cornell, 1997), and co-editor (with Judd Owen) of Religion, the Enlightenment, and the New Global Order (Columbia, 2011).  He is co-author, with Richard Rosecrance, of the IR textbook International Politics: How History Modifies Theory (Oxford, 2018).  He has published in the European Journal of International Relations, Foreign Affairs, International Organization, Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, National Interest, New York Times, Perspectives on Politics, Washington Post, USA Today, and a number of edited volumes.  Owen holds an A.B. from Duke University, an M.P.A. from Princeton University, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.  He has held fellowships or visiting positions at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Oxford (Nuffield College), the Free University of Berlin, the WZB Berlin Social Science Research Center, and the University of British Columbia.  His research has been supported by grants from the Mellon, MacArthur, Donchian, Earhart, and Smith Richardson foundations and the Army Research Laboratory.  From July 2011 through June 2014 he was Editor-in-Chief of Security Studies.  He is on the editorial board of that journal and of International Security. In 2015 he received a Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Bonn, Germany.

Allan C. Stam is University Professor of Public Policy and Politics at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. Previously he was Director of the International Policy Center at the Gerald R Ford School of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science and Senior research scientist at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research.  Prior to moving to Michigan in 2007 he was the Daniel Webster Professor at Dartmouth College (2000-2007) and was Assistant Professor at Yale University (1996-2000). His research focuses on the dynamics of armed conflict between and within states. Before completing his undergraduate degree at Cornell University in 1988 where he earned a varsity letter in heavyweight crew, he served as a communications specialist on an ‘A’ detachment in the U.S. Army Special Forces and later as an armor officer in the US Army Reserves. He holds an MA and PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan.

Gerry Warburg is a Professor of Practice and teaches courses at the Batten School on Congress, U.S. foreign policy and advocacy strategies. His research interests include the study of best practices by non-governmental organizations and the evolution of U.S. nuclear non-proliferation policies. Warburg’s professional background encompasses a broad array of public service. Previously, he served as Executive Vice President of Cassidy &Associates, a leading government relations firm. Prior to that position, he worked as a legislative assistant for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives under Senate Whip Alan Cranston and Representative Jonathan Bingham.