Faculty Facts: Research and professional activities

In a professional school with a multidisciplinary curriculum, it’s no surprise that the away-from-Fletcher activities of the faculty take different forms.  Though there’s certainly a common thread of research and writing, the research could be quantitative or qualitative, in the field or from a desk, and the media through which they publish will vary.  This is the fourth post in which we’ll highlight Fletcher professors’ current activities.

Susan Landau, Bridge Professor in the Fletcher School and the School of Engineering, Department of Computer Science, Tufts University

My recent work focuses on communications security and privacy, and my new book, Listening In: Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age, was just published by Yale University Press.  I am participating in a National Academies study on encryption tradeoffs, am a member of the Forum on Cyber Resilience, a National Academies roundtable, and recently served on a National Academies study on bulk signals intelligence collection, Bulk Collection of Signals Intelligence: Technical Options.  I have been a senior staff Privacy Analyst at Google, a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, and a faculty member at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Wesleyan University.

(Professor Landau was inducted into the Cybersecurity Hall of Fame in 2015, was a 2012 Guggenheim fellow, a 2010-2011 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and received the 2008 Women of Vision Social Impact Award.  She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for Computing Machinery.  She is also Visiting Professor in Computer Science, University College London.)

Professor Landau’s profile.  In the video below, she sits down with Dean Stavridis to discuss U.S. cybersecurity.

Hurst Hannum, Professor of International Law

I am on sabbatical leave in 2017-18, split between Washington, DC, and the Bonavero Instutite of Human Rights at the University of Oxford, during which time I will complete a book on the future of human rights, to be published in 2019 by Cambridge University Press.  My latest publications are the 6th edition of my co-authored International Human Rights: Problems of Law, Practice, and Policy (Aspen 2017); “Reinvigorating Human Rights for the Twenty-first Century,” 16 Human Rights Law Review 409 (2016); “Sovereignty, Self-Determination, and Autonomy,” in The United States, China, and International Law (Jacques de Lisle and William Burke-White eds., forthcoming Oxford University Press 2018); and “Human Rights,” in The Oxford Handbook on International Law in Asia and the Pacific (Simon Chesterman and Ben Saul eds., forthcoming OUP 2018).

Professor Hannum’s profile.

Avery Cohn, William R. Moomaw Assistant Professor of International Environment and Resource Policy

All of my work focuses on global environmental change and what people can do to confront it and cope with it.  I’m currently involved in three main research themes.  The first investigates the business case for protecting tropical ecosystems, given that these ecosystems regulate the local climate and therefore are important for agricultural productivity.  Initially, our focus is the world’s largest agricultural frontier — the Southern fringes of the Brazilian Amazon basin.  The work involves close collaboration with a coalition of businesses and NGOs working to find sustainable pathways for agricultural development in the tropics.  The second theme identifies the ingredients of scalable forest governance.  Here, I’m finding and analyzing cases of how public and private interests have cooperated to help forests achieve their potential.  Finally, I’m quantifying societal costs of climate change and how people can adapt to this emerging threat.  On this theme, I have been constructing profiles of resilient urban and rural households in sub-Saharan Africa, drawing on evidence from detailed agricultural surveys combined with remotely sensed indicators of climate, the environment, and infrastructure.  All of these projects are team affairs, involving many students and other collaborators from Fletcher, Tufts, and beyond.  Have a look here.

Professor Cohn’s profile.

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