Mailing address
Littauer 339B
79 John F. Kennedy Street
Cambridge, MA, 02138
James F. Smith
Communications Director, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
Contact:
Telephone: 617-495-7831
Fax: 617-495-8963
Email: james_smith@hks.harvard.edu
Experience
Jim Smith joined the Belfer Center as director of communications in July 2010 after more than two decades in journalism. At the Boston Globe from 2002 to 2010, he was foreign editor, national political editor and international affairs reporter, writing and blogging about Boston's global connections. He was Mexico City bureau chief and economic correspondent for the Los Angeles Times from 1997 to 2002, and the paper's bureau chief for southern South America from 1987 to 1990. During 12 years in South Africa, he worked as correspondent and news editor for the Associated Press, and also was founding editor of Business Report, the national business section for the Independent Newspapers chain. On leave from that group, he served for 18 months as communications consultant to the South African Secretary for Safety and Security to help revamp the national police service for a post-apartheid society. He also worked as communications and industrial relations director for a progressive South African manufacturing group. He is a graduate of Yale University, magna cum laude with distinction in history, and earned an MBA from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. A native of Boston, he is married to Maxine Hart and has two sons, Matthew and Daniel, and a stepdaughter, Leila.
June 12, 2013
Matthew Bunn Promoted to Professor of Practice
News
By James F. Smith, Communications Director, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Matthew Bunn, an associate professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, has been promoted to the rank of professor of practice, effective July 2013.
Bunn leads the Managing the Atom research project in the school’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The project is the hub of Harvard’s work on nuclear policy issues. Bunn's research interests interests include nuclear theft and terrorism; nuclear proliferation and measures to control it; the future of nuclear energy and its fuel cycle; and innovation in energy technologies.
Belfer Center Director Graham Allison said: “The Center is proud of Matt as an outstanding model of the combination of analysis and practice to which we aspire, as a leader in research activities at the Center, and as a colleague and friend.”
(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
June 5, 2013
Former Belfer Center Staffer Tapped for U.S. Envoy to the United Nations
News
By James F. Smith, Communications Director, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
Samantha Power, the former project director of the Human Rights Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs who went on to become a senior foreign policy adviser to President Obama, was nominated today to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The President announced Power’s nomination in a ceremony at the White House, in which he also appointed current U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to be his new national security adviser, succeeding Tom Donilon.
June 5, 2013
Stephen W. Bosworth Joins Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center as Senior Fellow
News
By James F. Smith, Communications Director, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
Ambassador Stephen W. Bosworth, who transformed Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy during his 12 years as dean, is joining Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs as a senior fellow. Belfer Center Director Graham Allison said Bosworth would bring to the Kennedy School a wealth of experience as a career diplomat, with a long focus on Asia and the Korean peninsula, areas of intense interest for the Belfer Center.
Photo by Martha Stewart
June 3, 2013
"Harvard Development Expert: Agricultural Innovation Offers Path to Overcome Hunger"
Press Release
By James F. Smith, Communications Director, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and Calestous Juma, Professor of the Practice of International Development; Director, Science, Technology, and Globalization Project; Principal Investigator, Agricultural Innovation in Africa
The world can only meet its future food needs through innovation, including the use of agricultural biotechnology, Belfer Center development specialist Calestous Juma said in an address to graduates of McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
Since their commercial debut in the mid-1990s, genetically designed crops have added about $100 billion to world crop output, avoided massive pesticide use and greenhouse gas emissions, spared vast tracts of land and fed millions of additional people worldwide, Juma said during the graduation ceremony where he received an honorary doctorate. He asked the graduates to embrace innovative sciences that alone will make it possible to feed the billions who will swell world population in decades ahead, especially in developing countries.
May 16, 2013
David Hamburg on Giving Peace a Chance
News
By James F. Smith, Communications Director, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
When Dr. David A. Hamburg led the Carnegie Corporation of New York in the 1980s and ‘90s, he drew on his roots as a physician to foster projects and research that advanced a simply stated goal: “the prevention of rotten outcomes.”
Now in his late 80s, Hamburg is still putting his medical instincts to work. He is discovering new ways to use early-prevention methods to avoid deadly conflict and enable healthy human development.
Hamburg spoke at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs on May 3 about his new book, Give Peace a Chance. His son and co-author, filmmaker Eric Hamburg, joined him at the event, along with two Harvard friends, Law School Dean Martha Minow and Belfer Center Director Graham Allison.
Summer 2013
"Confronting Complex Cybersecurity Challenges"
Newsletter Article, Belfer Center Newsletter
By James F. Smith, Communications Director, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
For the past four years, faculty and fellows from Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center and Massachusetts Institute of Technology have partnered in a project called "Explorations in Cyber International Relations." The ECIR project’s brief is "to explore alternative cyber developments, assess challenges and threats, and identify possibilities and opportunities in cyberspace for security and well-being."
Summer 2013
"Afghanistan’s Future Holds Promise, Danger, Experts Agree"
Newsletter Article, Belfer Center Newsletter
By James F. Smith, Communications Director, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
"Even as they acknowledged that potential dangers loom in Afghanistan over the next two years, experts at a Harvard conference pointed to some encouraging signs. One example: the number of schoolchildren has grown from 800,000 in 2001 to nearly nine million today....Speakers from Afghanistan and the West recognized that violence persists and problems such as endemic corruption still plague the country....But they took solace from the work of Afghans themselves in building a credible national military force that has increasingly taken on the brunt of combat duties"
(White House Photo)
Spring 2013
Spotlight on Gary Samore
Newsletter Article, Belfer Center Newsletter
By James F. Smith, Communications Director, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
In the complex world of the United States government, it’s rare for a lone White House official to oversee a real change in direction on a major policy issue. Gary Samore not only helped reshape U.S. policy on one issue; he did so with two immense national security challenges during his four years as President Obama’s Coordinator for Weapons of Mass Destruction Counter-Terrorism and Arms Control.
January 29, 2013
President Obama's WMD "Czar" Appointed Executive Director of Belfer Center
News
By James F. Smith, Communications Director, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
Gary Samore, President Obama’s Coordinator for Weapons of Mass Destruction Counter-Terrorism and Arms Control, has been appointed Executive Director (Research) for Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. A former fellow with the Belfer Center's International Security Program, Samore has served for the past four years as the principal advisor to the President on all matters relating to arms control and the prevention of weapons of mass destruction proliferation and WMD terrorism.
January 25, 2013
"Belfer Center Ranks High in Global Think Tank Survey"
News
By James F. Smith, Communications Director, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
For the third straight year, Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs has been ranked among the top university-affiliated think tanks in the world. The 2012 version of the annual survey, conducted by the International Relations Program at the University of Pennsylvania and released Jan. 24, ranks the Belfer Center second in the university-affiliated category, behind the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. A year earlier, the No. 1 and No. 2 rankings were reversed, with Belfer Center ranked first.
