Board member biographies

BIOGRAPHIES: CANADIAN PUGWASH BOARD OF DIRECTORS – 2021 to 2023

Chair: CESAR JARAMILLO

Cesar Jaramillo is executive director at Project Ploughshares, where his focus areas include nuclear disarmament, outer space security and conventional weapons control. As an international civil society representative, Cesar has addressed, among others, the UN General Assembly First Committee (Disarmament and International Security), the UN Conference on Disarmament, the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), and states parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Cesar attended the series of conferences on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons that preceded negotiations on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons as well as the negotiations themselves. He has given guest lectures and presentations at academic institutions such as New York University, the National Law University in New Delhi, the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, and the University of Toronto. An occasional columnist on matters of disarmament and international security, Cesar graduated from the University of Waterloo with an MA in global governance and has bachelor’s degrees in honours political science and in journalism. Prior to joining Project Ploughshares, Cesar held a fellowship at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI).

Vice-Chair: PEGGY MASON

Since June of 2014 Peggy Mason has been the President of the Rideau Institute, an independent think tank with a mandate to help revitalize Canada’s peacekeeping, diplomatic peacemaking and peacebuilding roles in the world, through inclusive multilateralism, strengthening the UN capacity for conflict prevention and peaceful conflict resolution and the progressive enhancement of international law.

Her distinguished career highlights diplomatic and specialist expertise in the field of international security, with a particular emphasis on the United Nations, where she served as Canada’s Ambassador for Disarmament from 1989 to 1995. She has led Canadian delegations to NPT and BWC Review Conferences, chaired UN expert groups on arms control verification and small arms regulation and served for two terms on the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament. In 2013 she received an achievement award from Canadians for a Nuclear Weapons Convention for her commitment to a nuclear-weapons-free world.

As Vice-Chair of the CPG Peggy Mason co-organized with the North American Arctic Defence and Security Network a series of webinars spanning Arctic security issues writ large and co-edited an ebook of the series, published in May 2021, entitled Beyond the Cooperation-Conflict Conundrum Proceedings of an Arctic Security Webinar Series.

Secretary: ROBIN COLLINS

Robin Collins has supported disarmament, global governance, alternative defence, peace and peacekeeping for over 30 years. From 1996-2002 he was a board member and later Chair of Mines Action Canada, the antipersonnel landmine ban coalition. He was primary author of MAC’s 2001 position paper on cluster bombs, and led the establishment of a national mine action technology competition for engineering students at Canadian universities. Collins has been involved since 1996 in nuclear weapon abolition advocacy through CNANW, where he is current Co-Chair. He is Secretary of Canadian Pugwash Group where he has presented on NATO nuclear policy, and peacekeeping success and failure. He was a Board member of the World Federalist Movement – Canada for two decades, where his interest was focussed on UN peacekeeping, UN Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS), Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the ICC and progressive UN reform. Collins has worked within the Group of 78 to draft statements on arms trade policy, and an alternative security policy, The Shift to Sustainable Peace and Common Security. Robin has a B.A. in political science from Carleton University. Now retired, for the last ~40 years he worked primarily for technology companies that built a variety of telephony, internet and microscope technologies. He writes a column, Current Controversies, for Peace Magazine (where he is a contributing editor). He writes occasional book reviews for The Canadian Field-Naturalist journal on environmental subjects.

Treasurer: PETER VENTON

Peter Venton has been the Treasurer and a member of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Pugwash Group since 2017 and lead of its Global Issues project since 2019. Prior to his retirement in 2009, he was a senior economist in the Ontario Government’s Ministry of Finance for 25 years; Vice President: Administration and Finance, at Wilfrid Laurier University (1979-1984); and Bursar at the University of St. Michaels College in the University of Toronto (2001-2009). He holds a MA in Economics from Queen’s University. Since his retirement in 2009, he has written some 16 articles on economic inequality, environmental sustainability, peace, globalization, democracy and capitalism. Two of the published articles were “Towards world federalism for international peace and a sustainable environment” in Ecological Integrity, Law and Governance, Routledge, New York, 2018 and “The Political Economy of Managing Without Growth.” In Ecological Integrity in Science and Law. Springer Nature, Switzerland, 2020. His Global Issues work includes a 24-page report on the Group of 78’s 2019 policy conference on “Global Markets, Inequality and the Future of Democracy”.

Director: BEV TOLLEFSON DELONG

Beverley J. Tollefson Delong is a graduate in law from Queen’s University. After practicing law for 11 years, she began directing her time to public education and advocacy concerning the risks posed by nuclear weapons with attention to the laws affecting the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons. She is a co-founder and Executive Member of Ploughshares Calgary Society (formerly Project Ploughshares Calgary). She served as President of Lawyers for Social Responsibility from 1991 to 2010. In the 1990s, Bev also participated in the Steering Committees for the Mines Action Canada and the World Court Campaign (Canada).

Bev served as Chairperson of the Canadian Network to Abolish Nuclear Weapons from 1998 until April 2019. She has served on the Board of Canadian Pugwash Group and has been on the organizational committee of several major conferences. She also participates in the Steering Committee of Canadians for a Nuclear Weapons Convention, a project of Canadian Pugwash.

Bev has been honoured with the Calgary YMCA Peace Award, the Alberta Centennial Medal and with the Annual Achievement Award from Canadians for a Nuclear Weapons Convention.

Director: WALTER DORN

Walter Dorn is Professor of Defence Studies at the Royal Military College of Canada (RMC) and the Canadian Forces College(CFC). He teaches officers of rank major to brigadier-general from Canada and about 20 other countries. He specializes in arms control, peace operations, just war theory, international criminal law, treaty verification and enforcement, and the United Nations. As an “operational professor” he participates in field missions and assists international organizations. For instance, he was a UN Electoral Officer for the 1999 referendum in East Timor and a Visiting Professional with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2010. He also served as a consultant with the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations, including in 2014 on the Expert Panel on Technology and Innovation in UN Peacekeeping. In 2020, during sabbatical leave, Dr. Dorn was with the UN as a “Technology Innovation Expert” exploring technologies for testing, piloting and employing in UN field operations. He served three terms as CPG Chair and has served on the Board since 1995.

Director: MICHEL DUGUAY

Michel Duguay was born in Montréal on September 12, 1939. Education: BS in physics at the University of Montreal in June 1961, Ph.D. in Physics (thesis in nuclear physics) from Yale University in Connecticut in 1966.

Hired by AT & T Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1966 he changed his field to work in opto-electronics, particularly in laser physics and semiconductors. From 1974 to 1977 he was delegated by Bell Labs to work at Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His research at Sandia involved X-ray lasers and the lighting of building interiors using waveguides for sunlight.

In 1977, back at Bell Labs, Duguay began research on semiconductor lasers pumped by picosecond laser pulses. Duguay and his colleague Ted Damen demonstrated that semiconductor lasers are capable of generating pulses of less than one picosecond and can produce the laser effect over very large bandwidths.

Subsequently, Duguay and his colleagues at Bell Labs Holmdel discovered a new type of waveguide called “ARROW”, an acronym for Anti-reflecting Resonant Optical Waveguide. This discovery has resulted in a large number of experiments in the world on devices involving the ARROW phenomenon.

Michel Duguay joined Laval University in 1988 as holder of an industrial chair sponsored by Quebec Téléphone in Rimouski and by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) in Ottawa. Duguay worked at Laval on optical communications, solar energy, the thermal storage of energy, and a new conceptual approach to space-time in special relativity, the so-called “diachronic time” approach. This diachronic time approach offers an original solution to the twin paradox in special relativity and the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect in quantum optics. Twenty-five students have obtained a master’s or doctorate degree under the direction or co-direction of Professor Duguay. During his career Duguay has published 75 articles and obtained 30 patents.

Since 2005 Michel Duguay has been active in the movement to prevent the reconstruction of the Gentilly-2 nuclear reactor. He was the coordinator of the Let’s Move Quebec out of Nuclear movement. Duguay has well documented the case to justify the opposition to the reconstruction of the Gentilly-2 nuclear reactor.

Since May 2014, Professor Duguay has been involved in the movement to improve international security and to promote nuclear disarmament. In June 2016, he was invited to participate in a panel on armed drones held on the University of Toronto campus and organized by the group Science for Peace.

In Quebec City Duguay got involved in the question of the future of the Quebec Bridge. He was co-author of an article published in Le Soleil on July 7, 2016, and he published a letter about it in the Journal de Québec on September 3, 2016. Local newspapers have quoted Duguay’s work.

In the past three years Duguay has written a few articles on how to motivate people to support nuclear disarmament. He argues that the life sciences, especially the genetics and genomics branches, can bring to light a unifying concept by showing that all persons on Earth are part of the one human genome. In addition, including the human genome as part of one’s self-identity broadens the time scale of interest to about one million years. This attitude, when broadly adopted, will lower the influence of the widespread us/them mindset, and motivate people everywhere to collaborate on all issues.

Michel Duguay retired from Laval University in January 2020. He is an active member of Science for Peace and Canadian Pugwash. Seven of his articles are on the Science for Peace website.

Director: ELLEN JUDD

Ellen Judd is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Manitoba and Visiting Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on political anthropology, political economy, gender and human rights. Her ethnographic work is concentrated in studies of sociocultural change in contemporary rural and urban China. She was educated at Queen’s University, the University of British Columbia, Fudan University, Beijing University and the University of Cambridge, and has held visiting appointments at Sun Yatsen University, Chongqing University, Columbia University and the London School of Economics. She is the author of Gender and Power in Rural North China, a special issue of Anthropologica on War and Peace, and numerous other publications, most recently the co-edited Cooperation in Chinese Communities: Morality and Practice. In 2006 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and in 2012-13 she served as President of the Canadian Anthropology Society. Ellen Judd has been involved in the peace movement since the Vietnam War era and in the disarmament movement of the early 1980s while in England. More recently she has served on the Board of Project Peacemakers, the Winnipeg affiliate of Project Ploughshares, and on the National Board of Canadian Voice of Women for Peace. She has been increasingly concerned with the renewed arms race, escalating tensions on the Korean Peninsula and the US pivot to Asia. Continuing wider concerns with disarmament, she finds her scholarly research converging with her concern for peace. Her current direction draws upon China’s cultural politics, the legacy of China’s long century (1839-1949) of devastating war and the political economy of contemporary China to identify and examine resources for peaceful coexistence. She finds the Russell-Einstein Manifesto regrettably all too pertinent at the present time.

Director: PAUL MEYER

Paul Meyer is a Senior Advisor to ICT4Peace and a Fellow of the Outer Space Institute. Prior to assuming his current appointments in 2011, Mr. Meyer had a 35-year career with the Canadian Foreign Service. Mr. Meyer had diplomatic assignments in Oslo, Moscow, Brussels (NATO), Washington, Tokyo and from 2003-2007 in Geneva where he served as Canada’s Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations and to the Conference on Disarmament. At the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade’s HQ, Meyer held a variety of positions including Director General for International Security (1998-2001) and Director General for Security and Intelligence (2007-2010). Throughout his work, Meyer has sought to promote international security by means of creative diplomacy. He currently is teaching a course on diplomacy at SFU’s School for International Studies and is engaged in research and writing on issues of nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, outer space security and international cyber security. Paul Meyer became a member of the Canadian Pugwash Group in 2011 and has served as CPG’s Vice-Chair (2013-17) and Chair (2017 -2021).

Director: TARIQ RAUF

Tariq Rauf is a Vienna-based expert and consultant on nuclear governance matters. He has served as Head of Verification and Security Policy Coordination, Office reporting to the Director General,International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); Alternate Head of the IAEA Delegation to NPT Conferences and PrepComs; IAEA Liaison and Point-of-Contact for the Trilateral Initiative, the Plutonium Management andDisposition Agreement, the Fissile Material Control Treaty, the Nuclear Suppliers Group, UNSCR 1540 Committee and (UN) Counter-Terrorism Implementation Task Force; Coordinator of IAEA Multilateral Approaches to the Nuclear Fuel Cycle, and IAEA Forum on Experience of Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zones Relevant for the Middle East.

Also, former: •Member, Group of Eminent Persons for Substantive Advancement of Nuclear Disarmament established by the Foreign Minister of Japan. •Consulting Advisor for policy and outreach to the Executive Secretary, Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO). •Director, Disarmament and Arms Control, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. •Member of Canada’s NPT Delegation.•Advisor, Foreign Affairs and National Defence Committees, Parliament of Canada, •Director, International Organizations and Nonproliferation Programme, Centre for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute for International Studies. •Senior Research Associate, Canadian Centre for Arms Control and Disarmament.

Education: University of the Panjab (Pakistan); University of London: London School of Economics; Political Science (LSE) and King’s College; Carleton University and the University of Toronto in Canada where he was the Ford Foundation Fellow in Dual Expertise: International Security/Arms Control and Soviet-East European Studies.

Director: SHANE ROBERTS

Shane Roberts is a futurist, former intelligence analyst and life-long educational activist dedicated to engaging the public and experts in shaping prospects for a better future. Shane left the public service in 2013, after serving a decade as a futurist for emergency preparedness. He has given over 75 talks in Canada, the US and Europe to spies, scientists, scholars, specialists and students from over 40 countries representing governments, universities, think-tanks and our future. Shane continues to give talks to experts, NGOs, officials, and the public on global trends, natural and anthropogenic risks to humanity, and the work of the United Nations.

Before his work in futures studies, Shane was in foreign intelligence for two decades – half of that time supporting the Intelligence Assessment Secretariat for the Prime Minister and upper echelons of government. An award-winning analyst, he participated strategic assessments of diplomatic, economic, military and technological issues.

Shane is a member of several NGOs involved in science and global affairs: the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Canadian Coalition for Global Health Research, the Canadian Pugwash Group, and the United Nations Association (UNA). In the UNA for over 35 years, he has served as a Branch President, Treasurer, newsletter editor, and on its national Board of Directors. As a member of CPG’s Board of Directors, he has served as its Secretary since 2017.

He immigrated to Canada in 1968 as a draft resister to what he and his family saw as an illegal war.

Director: ERIKA SIMPSON

Erika Simpson (PhD and MA, University of Toronto) is an Associate Professor of International Relations at Western University, London, Canada and the President of the Canadian Peace Research Association (CPRA). Her research interests are in international security and foreign and defence policy, particularly Afghanistan, arms control, disarmament, IR theory, NATO, nuclear proliferation, nuclear waste, peacekeeping and the UN. She is the author of NATO and the Bomb (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001) and her articles have appeared in leading journals including the Brown Journal of World Politics; International Journal; In Victus Pax: Journal of Peace Education and Social Justice; Peace Magazine; Peace Research; Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice; and Policy Options. She is a national syndicated columnist for the Postmedia Network, Canada’s largest digital and newspaper chain, and a frequent commentator for Canada’s foreign policy magazine The Hill-Times, as well as Asia’s Urdu News, Canada’s CTV Television News and Russia’s Sputnik News. She serves as a director on the board of the Canadian Pugwash Group; an associate editor for Peace Review; a senior advisor for the Rideau Institute; an invited consultant for the Nuclear Abolition Forum; and a peer reviewer for the Canadian Institute for Military and Veteran Health. Formerly she was an Alton Jones Fellow; a Barton Fellow; a Liu Institute Visiting Fellow; a NATO Research Fellow; and the vice-chair and treasurer of Pugwash Canada. In 2015, the Voice of Women–Canada awarded her a Lifetime Achievement Award for her writing on peace-related issues. At the University of Western Ontario, she teaches undergraduate, MA, and PhD students. She is a Canadian citizen and a long-time resident of London, Ontario, Canada.

Director emeritus: ADELE BUCKLEY M.Sc., Ph.D., D.Sc.(hon); physicist, engineer (aerospace) and environmental scientist; Past Chair of Canadian Pugwash (CPG); member of international Pugwash Council. Steering Committee member– Canadians for a Nuclear Weapons Convention (CNWC). Leads CPG campaign for a nuclear-weapon-free Arctic; many presentations – 8 countries. Manager of arcticnwfz@googlegroups.com.
Lead organizer for Pugwash anniversary convention, 2017 – ‘Canada’s Contribution to Global Security’. Professional background: founding partner of Sciex, developer and manufacturer of mass spectrometry systems; now has extensive worldwide installations. Formerly V.P. Solarchem Environmental Systems, UVB systems for removal of environmental contaminants in water; formerly V.P. Technology and Research, Ontario Centre for Environmental Technology Advancement; environmental technology verification; advising environmental technology entrepreneurs.

Director emeritus: METTA SPENCER; Professor emeritus of sociology, University of Toronto. She coordinated a program in peace and conflict studies at the Mississauga campus until retiring in 1997. She served several terms as president of Science for Peace. Professor Spencer’s introductory sociology textbook, Foundations of Modern Sociology, was published in ten editions in the United States and Canada and, according to one informed estimate, was read—at least in part—by over a million persons worldwide, mainly university students.
Another of her books, Two Aspirins and a Comedy: How Television Can Enhance Health and Society, explores the way serial dramas can sometimes create intense parasocial bonds with fictional characters that can influence a whole culture more powerfully than education or advertising. She advocates the development of well-crafted soap operas to improve a society’s prevailing ideology about war and politics. Spencer’s book, The Russian Quest for Peace and Democracy, was based on 28 years of interviewing prominent Soviet and Russian political figures, Eastern Europeans, and Western peace activists. Over 200 of the interview transcripts and many of the voice recordings are accessible at: RussianPeaceAndDemocracy.Com. She has also edited a number of other books on peace and conflict issues. See her web site mettaspencer.com. Spencer is the founding and continuing editor of Peace Magazine. Most issues include transcripts of an interview with a prominent activist or influential person. See the archive at peacemagazine.org. Peace Magazine is accessible by subscription in print or online: https://www.pressreader.com/canada/peace-magazine/.

In 2018 Spencer organized a two-day conference at the University of Toronto where 100 participants listed 25 proposals that would, if implemented, vastly reduce the risk of six grave global threats: war and weapons (especially nuclear); global warming; famine; pandemics; radioactive contamination; and cyber risks. This “Platform for Survival” could be adopted by many different activists as a common program. Intending to promote such adoption, Spencer has created a website, tosavetheworld.ca, as a meeting place for people working against these threats. It offers an events calendar for activists and researchers to publicize public activities anywhere in the world.

“Project Save the World,” has a Youtube channel, Youtube.com/c/tosavetheworld. A series of educational videos are accessible 24/7. Several days each week, Spencer discusses current global issues with one or more experts. As of early November 2021 there are 368 one-hour-long shows in the series. People can post articles, comments, and replies about the shows, the six global threats, and three policy sectors of society: governance, economy, and civil society.