Frank Pabian named Visiting Fellow at Stanford's CISAC

December 1, 2011—Frank Pabian of LANL's International Research and Analysis group will serve an eight-month appointment at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) as a Visiting Fellow. He will conduct research on recent advances in social networking, open-source information, and cyber-based geospatial technologies and their impact on changing global transparency paradigms.

He also will examine how to leverage those technologies for arms control and nonproliferation treaty monitoring and verification applications, lecture on technology and national security for courses at Stanford University, give presentations at other universities, and participate in U.S. Government-sponsored conferences.

Research and professional activities

Pabian has nearly 40 years in the nuclear nonproliferation and satellite imagery analysis fields, including 30 years with LANL and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. As LANL’s senior geospatial information analyst, his responsibilities include “Rest-of-World” infrastructure analysis involving the exploitation of all-source information, particularly commercial satellite imagery in combination with openly available geospatial tools for visualization. He has published in numerous peer-reviewed scientific journals on the use of commercial satellite imagery for treaty verification and monitoring, and his work has been featured on magazine covers and in textbooks used for nonproliferation and intelligence training.

Pabian received the U.S. Intelligence Community Seal Medallion (gold medal) for "sustained superior performance" while providing Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty verification support to the International Atomic Energy Agency during South Africa’s denuclearization and for associated discoveries derived from original analysis of all-source, including open source, information. He is a certified mapping scientist (remote sensing) with the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.

Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation

The Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation is an interdisciplinary university-based research and training center addressing some of the world's most difficult security problems with policy-relevant solutions. The Center conducts scholarly research and gives independent advice to governments and international organizations. Siegfried Hecker (Stanford Department of Management Science and Engineering and retired LANL director) and Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar (Stanford Law School) co-direct CISAC.