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Nancy Gallagher

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Nancy Gallagher is the Director at the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM) and a Research Professor in the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy. Her current research includes a book project on Strategic Logics for Arms Control; public opinion surveys about security policy in the United States and Iran; initiatives to improve cybersecurity decision-making; and cooperative strategies to reduce nuclear risks.

Before coming to the University of Maryland, Dr. Gallagher was the Executive Director of the Clinton administration's Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Task Force and worked with the Special Advisor to the President and the Secretary of State to build bipartisan support for U.S. ratification. She was an arms control specialist in the State Department, a Foster Fellow in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and a faculty member at Wesleyan University. 

Dr. Gallagher is the author of The Politics of Verification (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), and the editor of Arms Control: New Approaches to Theory and Policy (Frank Cass, 1998). She has co-authored three monographs: Comprehensive Nuclear Material Accounting: A Proposal to Reduce Global Nuclear Risk (2014); Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security (2008); and Controlling Dangerous Pathogens (2007). With Iranian and American colleagues, Dr. Gallagher has fielded a series of surveys of Iranian public opinion about the 2015 nuclear deal, domestic politics, and regional security.  She has also written numerous policy reports, articles, and op eds. Dr. Gallagher won the University of Maryland’s 2015 Research Communication Impact Award for work on the Iranian nuclear agreement, and the Outstanding Invention of 2016 award for her development, with Charles Harry, of a cybersecurity risk analysis framework.

Areas of Interest
  • International security; arms control & nonproliferation; nuclear policy; cybersecurity; space security
3 Credit(s)

Reviews the principal features of international security as currently practiced. Traces the evolution of contemporary policy beginning with the initiation of nuclear weapons programs during World War II. Particular emphasis is given to experience of the United States and Russia, since the historical interaction between these two countries has disproportionately affected the international security conditions that all other countries now experience. Restricted to students in a major in PLCY.
Schedule of Classes

Faculty: Nancy Gallagher
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