Speaker: Bárbara Cruvinel Santiago

Dr. Bárbara Cruvinel Santiago is a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), studying how to flag dual purpose physics research so we can prevent its weaponization. Before coming to CISAC, Bárbara got her physics Ph.D. at Columbia University working on astronomical instrumentation under a NASA FINESST fellowship. Born and raised in Brazil, she got her BS in physics at Yale, after which she worked at MIT’s Nobel-Prize-winning LIGO lab and got her master’s at Columbia. She was one of the inaugural fellows of the Next-Generation Fellowship from the Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction, and received the 2021 American Physical Society 5 Sigma Physicist Award for congressional advocacy in nuclear disarmament.

Before starting her post-doc, Bárbara did research in a variety of fields, from particle and atomic physics to quantum optics and astronomical instrumentation. Her CISAC post-doc research, however, focuses on how to identify dual-purpose research developed by academics/civilians but of military interest, especially in the physical sciences, as a means to help on nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear threat reduction initiatives.