Siegfried S. Hecker (NAE) is a professor (research) in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He was codirector of Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) in 2007–2012, and before that senior fellow (until July 2005, when joined Stanford University) and director (1986–1997) of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), where he led the Materials Science and Technology Division and Center for Materials Science.

His research projects at CISAC focus on nuclear risk reduction, including the challenges of nuclear India, Pakistan, and North Korea and the nuclear aspirations of Iran, as well as reducing the risks of global nuclear terrorism. Other research interests include plutonium science, nuclear weapons policy, nuclear security, and the safe and secure expansion of nuclear energy. For more than two decades he has fostered cooperation with Russian nuclear laboratories to safeguard the vast stockpile of ex-Soviet fissile materials, and he is compiling and editing a book with two Russian colleagues on the history of Russian-US laboratory-to-laboratory nuclear cooperation since 1992. He also works closely with Chinese colleagues to enhance the safety and security of China’s nuclear complex.

In addition to his NAE membership, Dr. Hecker is a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and India Institute of Metals; fellow of the Minerals, Metallurgy and Materials Society (TMS), American Society for Metals, American Physical Society (APS), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and honorary member of the American Ceramics Society.

His achievements have been recognized nationally with the Presidential Enrico Fermi Award, the AAAS Award for Science Diplomacy, the Leo Szilard Lectureship (APS), the American Nuclear Society’s Seaborg Medal, the Department of Energy’s E.O. Lawrence Award, and the LANL Medal, as well as the Stanford University Eugene L. Grant Undergraduate Teaching Award and the Case Western Reserve University Alumni Association Gold Medal and Undergraduate Distinguished Alumni Award.

Dr. Hecker received his BS and MS in metallurgy from Case Institute of Technology and his PhD in metallurgy from Case Western Reserve University.