Contact Information
Dr. William A. Blanpied
Visiting Senior Research Scholar, Science & Trade Policy Program
The Tech Center
E-mail:
Phone: 703-993-8210
Fax: 703-993-8211
Office:
Mail Stop: 1E5
Profile
William A. Blanpied is Visiting Senior Research Scholar in the Science and Trade Policy Program at George Mason University. Prior to his retirement from the federal government in January 2003 he had been, since 1983, Senior International Analyst at the National Science Foundation (NSF), except for the period from July 1999 through August 2002 when he served as Director of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Tokyo Regional Office in the US Embassy.
During his three-year tenure in Tokyo, Blanpied traveled extensively in Japan and East Asia in order to collect information for a number of reports on significant science policy events occurring in the region. He also maintained his involvement in organizing a series of US-China science policy seminars, the first of which was held in Beijing in October 1999. Prior to his departure for Tokyo in July 1999, Blanpied was responsible for evaluating U.S. and foreign science and technology policies and in analyzing opportunities for scientific cooperation in various regions, including East Asia, Central/Eastern Europe and the NAFTA region. He was US delegate and, for four years, Chair of the Organisation for Econnomic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Group on the Science System, and has served a consultant to the OECD Megascience Forum (now the Global Science Forum) since its creation in 1992. Blanpied also served as NSF's principal liaison officer for the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU).
Blanpied's international experience prior to joining NSF included extended periods of working residence in Italy (as a post-doctoral fellow at the National Synchrotron Laboratory at Frascati) and India, where he served as resident physicist with the National Science Foundation's Science Education Liaison Staff in New Delhi from 1969-71. During his two years in India, he became interested in the development of modern science in Asia and has written and lectured extensively on that topic. Blanpied's current scholarly interest is in the development of science policy in the post-World War II period. He has presented invited lectures in several countries, including India, Hungary, Japan, Mexico and the People's Republic of China. During the early 1990s, he served concurrently as Chair of the American Physical Society's ad-hoc Task Force on the Crisis of Physics in the Former Soviet Union, and its Forum on International Physics.
Blanpied joined NSF in 1976 as Program Manager for Ethics and Human Values in Science and Technology. Subsequently, he served as Head of the Office of Special Projects in the Office of the Director before joining the Division of International Programs (since 2001 the Office of International Science and Engineering) in 1983. Prior to his service with NSF, he held faculty appointments in the physics departments at Case Western Reserve, Yale, and Harvard Universities, where his research interests were in experimental particle physics. While at Harvard, he established and served as first editor of an international newsletter that has since evolved into the quarterly journal, Science, Technology and Human Values. He left Harvard in 1974 to become Head of the Division of Public Sector Programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), where he was among those responsible for instituting the annual AAAS budget analysis and the series of annual meetings which evolved into the AAAS Science and Technology Policy Colloquia.
Blanpied received his BS degree from Yale University in 1955 and his PhD in physics from Princeton University in 1959. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society. From 1987 to 1989 he was on leave of absence from NSF as Scholar in Residence at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and was an Adjunct Professor at George Mason University's International Institute from 1991 to 1996. He is the author or co-author of three books, and has published numerous articles and reviews in the professional literature on physics, history of science, international science, and science policy, including both its national and international aspects.
Education
Princeton University, Ph.D. in Physics, 1959
Yale University, B.S., 1955