Michael Nacht holds the campus's Thomas and Alison Schneider Chair in Public Policy. From 1998-2008 he was Aaron Wildavsky Dean of the Goldman School for Public Policy. Nacht has had a diverse career in academia, government and the private sector, specializing in U.S. national security policy and international affairs; science, technology and public policy; and management strategies for complex organizations. Nacht's previous academic appointments were at the University of Maryland at College Park, and at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where he served as associate director of the Center for Science and International Affairs, acting director of the Harvard Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, and founding co-editor of International Security, a quarterly journal. In government, Nacht was Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs from 2009-10, after unanimous Senate confirmation, for which he received the Distinguished Public Service Award, the highest civilian honor. He was previously Assistant Director for Strategic and Eurasian Affairs in the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (1994-97). He began his career as a NASA missile aerodynamicist during the manned space program. Nacht participated in five U.S. Presidential Summit meetings with the Russian and Chinese presidents. His current research is on modifications to strategic deterrence; assessing latent strategic capabilities; aspects of cyber and space policy; and strategies in East Asia and the Middle East. He is the author or co-author of five books and more than 80 journal articles and book chapters. His opinion articles have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times. Nacht received a B.S. in aeronautics and astronautics and an M.S. in operations research from New York University, and a PhD in political science and international relations from Columbia University.