Citation:
Claudio Gariazzo, William Charlton, Kenneth Lee Peddicord, “US-Russia Academic Collaborations at Texas A&M University”, 51st Annual Meeting of the Institute of Nuclear Materials and Management, Baltimore, MD, USA, July 11-15, 2010.
Abstract:
The United States and the Russian Federation have long worked together to combat growing trends in nuclear proliferation due to a common understanding of the dangers and experience in securing such materials from the hands of proliferators and eventually terrorists. Since 1996, Texas A&M University (TAMU) has led a number of academic safeguards and nonproliferation collaborations with Russian universities such as the Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute (MEPhI) and the Obninsk Institute for Atomic Energy (IATE). These collaborations have ranged between research projects by students and staff and educational endeavors at respective institutions for increasing the number of technical safeguards experts in Russia and the U.S. The main crux of this academic collaboration focuses on students and respective faculties at the universities. This paper will discuss a plethora of various activities recently conducted between the educational institutions in both countries and a selection of future activities currently planned for the next year: student exchanges at respective universities, sharing of educational lessons and examinations, joint tours of nuclear facilities, and open dialogues between students in the fields of nuclear material safeguards and security.