Staff News

FAS Welcomes New Members of Staff

Sarah Chankin-Gould is a Scoville Peace Fellow and chose to spend her fellowship with the Arms Sales Monitoring Project at FAS. She graduated from Occidental College in May 2003 with a B.A. in Diplomacy and World Affairs and in Spanish.

Christine Palumbo began working with FAS as an intern for the Learning Technologies Project and has joined FAS full-time serving as both the Project Assistant for the Digital Promise Project and the Administrative Assistant for the Organizational Manager. Christine received her B.A. from Hamilton College in Clinton, NY with a major in government and a minor in philosophy in the spring of 2002.

Rachel Jagoda joined the FAS staff in October as Project Manager for Housing Technology. The housing technology project focuses on designing energy-efficient and structurally sound housing for communities in the United States and abroad. Current plans include creating earthquake and fire resistant housing in California and Afghanistan.

Rachel received her bachelor’s degree in physics from Georgetown University in 2002. Prior to coming to FAS, she worked in the Public Affairs Department at the American Society for Engineering Education, where she worked to educate the public on the benefits of science education in the United States and to encourage Congress to increase funding for education and research. She also worked in Government Affairs for the American National Standards Institute, which coordinates with the US government to administer the US standards system.

Becky Sullivan joined the FAS team in October 2003 as a research assistant for the Learning Technologies Project. Becky received her Bachelor of Science degree in business administration with a minor in biology from the University of Richmond in May 2003. At FAS she will provide research assistance, develop and maintain the Learning Federation’s web presence, and coordinate conferences and workshops.

Benn Tannenbaum recently joined FAS as the Senior Research Associate for the Strategic Security Project. Dr. Tannenbaum’s research at FAS focuses on nuclear weapons. He also coordinates FAS’s Congressional outreach efforts.

Prior to his current appointment, Dr. Tannenbaum served as the 2002- 2003 American Physical Society Congressional Science Fellow.

During his fellowship, Dr. Tannenbaum worked for Representative Edward J. Markey (D-MA) on nonproliferation issues. This work included several key nuclear policy amendments, numerous oversight letters and staffing the House Bipartisan Task Force on Nonproliferation. The legislative work focused on nuclear "bunker busters", missile defense, Iran’s nuclear program and preventing US nuclear technology from being transferred to North Korea. The oversight letters covered issues ranging from the disbanding of the NNSA Advisory Committee, to the failure to secure known nuclear sites in Iraq, to presenting a detailed plan to solve the nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula. Through the Bipartisan Task Force on Nonproliferation, Dr. Tannenbaum brought nationally recognized experts on topics such as Iran’s nuclear program and political situation, dirty bombs, and the Biological Weapons Convention to brief Members of Congress and their staffs. His final Task Force event had Dr. Jane Goodall and Michael Douglas addressing the need for strong, multilateral institutions to solve problems such as nuclear proliferation and environmental damage.

Before his fellowship, Dr. Tannenbaum worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles. At UCLA he was involved in the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Collider Detector Facility at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago, Illinois. He received his Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico in 1997. His dissertation involved a search for evidence of supersymmetry. None was found.