Dr. Gerald L. Epstein has spent forty years working at the intersection of science, technology, and national security, having served in government, academic, and civil society organizations. In addition to his adjunct position at RAND, he serves in advisory positions with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
Originally trained as a physicist, he began his professional career at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), analyzing technological and policy aspects of topics including ballistic missile defense, antisatellite arms control, fusion energy, defense technology, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. At Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, he studied the relationship between military and civil technologies and co-authored the book Beyond Spinoff: Military and Commercial Technologies in a Changing World. He created and taught courses at Princeton University on arms control and nonproliferation and at Georgetown University on science, technology, and homeland security. Government positions in addition to OTA have included Deputy Assistant Secretary for Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Policy at the Department of Homeland Security and two tours at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) – once in a joint OSTP/NSC appointment as Assistant Director of OSTP for National Security and Senior NSC Director for Science and Technology, and a second as Assistant Director of OSTP for Biosecurity and Emerging Technologies. His most recent government position was at National Defense University’s Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction, from which he retired in April 2023. Nongovernmental positions have included Senior Fellow for Science and Security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Director of the Center for Science, Technology, and Security Policy at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Dr. Epstein is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the AAAS and is a member of the editorial boards for the journals Health Security and Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology. He has served on several panels for National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, including the Board on Life Sciences , the Biological Threats Panel of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control, and the committees that produced the reports Leveraging the Future Research and Development Ecosystem for the Intelligence Community (2022), Safeguarding the Bioeconomy (2020), and Beyond Fortress America: National Security Controls on Science and Technology in a Globalized World (2009). He received S.B. degrees in physics and in electrical engineering from MIT and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at Berkeley.
