Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

• 1. Introduction

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  The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs sits inside the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it was born from a question a biochemist couldn't shake. Paul M. Doty was a Harvard scientist who spent the Cold War worrying about something that had nothing to do with his laboratory work: the dangerous gap in how the United States and the Soviet Union understood each other. He noticed that universities offered almost no courses on arms control or international security. If trained scholars weren't studying these questions, who was guiding the people making the decisions? That concern led Doty to imagine a program at Harvard dedicated entirely to those areas. What grew from that idea became one of the most prominent research centers in American foreign policy. How did a biochemist's personal alarm shape a generation of thinking about weapons, diplomacy, and the planet? And what controversies has that growth brought along the way?

• 2. Doty's Cold War Alarm

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  Paul M. Doty was a Harvard biochemist, not a diplomat or a general. His training was in the structure of molecules, not the architecture of treaties. Yet during the Cold War, Doty found himself preoccupied with the state of US-USSR relations in a way his scientific colleagues were not. What troubled him most was the absence he noticed in academic life: universities were simply not producing people trained to think rigorously about arms control or international security. Doty concluded that this gap was dangerous. He proposed filling it through a dedicated Harvard program, and that proposal became the foundation on which the Belfer Center eventually stood.

• 3. Mission and Focus

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  The center functions as the hub of the Kennedy School's work in international security and diplomacy, environmental and resource issues, and science and technology policy. It organizes its work into subgroups, each with a specific area of focus. Research, teaching, and training all happen under the same roof. That breadth reflects Doty's original intuition: that the problems most likely to destabilize the world would not respect the boundaries between academic disciplines.

• 4. Leadership

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  Ash Carter, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense, led the center from 2017 until his death in October 2022. Alongside Carter served Eric Rosenbach as co-director; Rosenbach had previously served as a U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense. The combination of two former Pentagon officials at the top of an academic research center signaled how closely the center's work tracked the concerns of actual government practice. Today the center's executive director is Natalie Colbert, and Meghan O'Sullivan serves as director.

• 5. Conflicts and Controversies

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  In 2012, the Stanton Foundation provided funds for a paid Wikipedian in residence at the Belfer Center. The arrangement quickly drew scrutiny. Critics pointed to the relationship between the two organizations: the directors of the Belfer Center and the Stanton Foundation were a married couple. That personal connection raised public concerns about conflict-of-interest editing on a platform that depends on editorial independence. A separate controversy arrived in 2021, when a student group called Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard published an investigative report. The group found that many of the center's climate initiatives had been funded in part by fossil fuel companies. The report also alleged that the center had taken several steps to conceal that fact.