Michael V. Hynes, who has served as a senior nuclear weapons physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a policy analyst at Rand Corp. on the dynamics of global nuclear terrorism, will speak from 3:30 to 5 p.m. at Pastore Hall, 51 Lower College Road, Room 124. His talk on nuclear forensics is free and open to the public.
His responsibilities at Raytheon include turning his counterterrorism policy recommendations into practice.
Hynes began at Raytheon after almost 10 years as a policy and technology analyst at Rand, a nonprofit think tank based in Santa Monica, Calif. that helps improve policy and decision-making through research and analysis. His analytical work there included mapping the pathways a terrorist group would take in pursuit of a nuclear weapon, as well as the resources needed to detect such a program. He also worked to apply modern network analysis techniques to understanding the vulnerabilities of terrorist and insurgent networks and strategies for attacking these vulnerabilities.
Before Rand, he worked at Los Alamos for 15 years where he conducted a wide variety of basic and applied research projects in the Nuclear Weapons Testing Program, and at nuclear and particle physics facilities around the world. Hynes has served as a technical consultant to the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks and as the executive officer of the Los Alamos Nonproliferation Task Force.
He earned his bachelor’s degree and his doctorate in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned his master’s degree in management from MIT as well.
Hynes has authored 50 publications in refereed technical literature, as well as 15 classified articles and reports.