Gerald L. Epstein is a biosecurity resident expert (adjunct) at RAND. He has worked at the intersection of science, technology, and national security for forty years, serving in government, academic, and civil society organizations. In addition to his adjunct position at RAND, he serves in advisory positions with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
Trained as a physicist, he began his professional career at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), working on international security and energy issues. At Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, he studied the relationship between military and civil technologies. He created and taught courses on arms control and nonproliferation at Princeton University and on science, technology, and homeland security at Georgetown University. He also served in government at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (with a joint appointment on the National Security Council staff), the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Defense University. Other nongovernmental positions included the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Epstein is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the AAAS, a member of the editorial boards for the journals Health Security and Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, and has served on several panels for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM).
Epstein received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at Berkeley.
Ph.D. in physics, University of California-Berkeley; M.A. in physics, University of California-Berkeley; B.S. in physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; B.S. in electrical engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
