When Andrew Carnegie realized that he had more money than he could give away, he established the Carnegie Corporation of New York to do it for him. The corporation this week selected 16 professors and researchers nationwide to be Carnegie Scholars. Among them is University research associate Sharon Weiner.
Weiner, a post-doctoral member of the Wilson School's Program in Science and Global Security, will receive a grant of $100,000 from the Carnegie Corporation over two years to continue her research.
She came to the University in 1999 to study the "bureaucratic politics of national security in the United States," Weiner said, and next year the grant will allow her to devote her time to studying U.S. programs that re-employ former Russian nuclear weapons scientists.
"Carnegie is very generous," Weiner said. She explained that not only will the grant pay her salary, but it will also allow her to travel to several countries to conduct her research. She said she hopes to travel to Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and several other European countries.
"The Carnegie money basically frees me to focus specifically on this research topic, which is a luxury in this business," she said.
Carnegie vice president for public affairs Susan King said Weiner's research is a good match for the Carnegie Corporation. "Nuclear nonproliferation is one of our focuses," King said.
"With the collapse of the Soviet Union," Weiner explained, "the question was what happens to Russia's nuclear weapons."
Since 1994 the United States has been working with Russia to find non-military jobs for former military scientists. The fear is that if the scientists begin working for the highest bidder, nuclear weapons proliferation may start in many other nations.
"You do not want unemployed nuclear weapons scientists," Weiner said.
"[The Carnegie Scholar program] is a competitive program to spotlight some of the innovative scholarship going on around the country," King said. The program awards both young and experienced scholars. Above all other factors, "excellence in scholarship is number one," she said.
The 16 winners were chosen from a pool of over 80 applicants, all nominated by leaders in their fields. King said after several rounds of narrowing the applications, selection committee members sat around a table to discuss which of the proposed studies raised the most challenging and unique questions. The applicants were also judged on "the ability to put out a hypothesis, to test it and the ability to explain that," King said.
The Carnegie Corporation has an endowment of nearly $2 billion. It focuses on "education, international affairs, African development and democracy questions," King said.
Weiner — who received her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in political science — will begin her research in the fall and may begin traveling at the end of next year. The goal of her research, she said, is to write a book on how the nonproliferation programs could be improved. "It's nice to actually see someplace for what you're doing can make the world a better place."
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