Nancy Gallagher is the Director for Research at the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM) and a Senior Research Scholar at the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy. She co-directs the Advanced Methods of Cooperative Security Program, an interdisciplinary effort to address the security implications of globalization by developing more refined rules of behavior and more comprehensive transparency arrangements. Her current research analyzes policy options to maximize benefits and minimize risks from the global spread of space capabilities, biotechnology and nuclear energy.
Before coming to the University of Maryland, Gallagher was the Executive Director of the Clinton administration's Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Task Force and worked with the Special Advisor to the President and the Secretary of State on recommendations to build bipartisan support for U.S. ratification. She has been an arms control specialist in the State Department, a Foster Fellow in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and a faculty member at Wesleyan University.
Gallagher is the author of The Politics of Verification (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), the editor of Arms Control: New Approaches to Theory and Policy (Frank Cass, 1998), and the co-author of Comprehensive Nuclear Material Accounting (CISSM, 2014), Reconsidering the Rules for Space Security (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2008) and Controlling Dangerous Pathogens: A Prototype Protective Oversight System (CISSM, 2007). She has also written articles on space security, nuclear arms control and nonproliferation, public opinion, and other topics related to global security. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.