Bio
Professor Jack Beard previously served as the Associate Deputy General Counsel (International Affairs) in the Department of Defense where he was responsible for a variety of legal matters, including those associated with arms control agreements, defense cooperation and basing agreements in the Middle East region, and programs assisting states of the former Soviet Union in the dismantlement of weapons of mass destruction and other nonproliferation activities. He served as the senior lawyer on numerous U.S. delegations negotiating international agreements related to a wide range of U.S. military operations and activities. He is also a Lieutenant Colonel in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, U.S. Army Reserve (Retired) and served as the Chief, International Law Section, International and Operational Law Division, Office of The Judge Advocate General. For his work as a consultant on international legal issues for the Department of Defense, he was awarded the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service in 2013.
Professor Beard teaches National Security Law, Arms Control and Human Rights and International Criminal Law. He also teaches courses as a faculty member in the Space, Cyber and Telecom Law Program, including Cyber Warfare and National Security Space Law. His research interests and scholarship focus on the international legal implications of modern military technologies. Some of Professor Beard’s recent works have explored international legal issues raised by remotely controlled weapon systems and the nature of new conflicts in cyberspace. His latest article, in the Georgetown University Journal of International Law, is entitled “Autonomous Weapons and Human Responsibilities.”
Bio
White has served as UNL’s director of academic programs at the Great Plains National Security Education Consortium, an Intelligence Community Center for Academic Excellence, since 2011. He developed UNL’s National Security Studies minor and has worked with UNL’s Intelligence Community Scholars Program. His research interests are in international security, specifically nuclear policy, and in human security. He co-developed and ran a task-force style simulation for the International Community Center for Academic Excellence in Washington DC for the past three summers.
Bio
Mehta’s research interests lie in international security and conflict, with a particular interest in nuclear security, latency, extended deterrence nonproliferation, force structure and deterrence theory. She has written on the conditions under which states stop their pursuit of nuclear weapons programs. She is a member of the University of Nebraska’s National Strategic Research Institute. Mehta holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, San Diego. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Belfer Center in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She was a researcher at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC.