Institute Scholars and Practitioners in Residence (INSPIRE)
Practitioners/Scholars in Residence
Current Year: 2010-2011
Thomas S. Blanton | Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy | Gary Knight
THOMAS S. BLANTON is Director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington D.C. The Archive won U.S. journalism’s George Polk Award in April 2000 for “piercing self-serving veils of government secrecy, guiding journalists in search for the truth, and informing us all.” Blanton served as the Archive’s first Director of Planning & Research beginning in 1986, became Deputy Director in 1989, and Executive Director in 1992. He served as a contributing author to the Brookings Institution study Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940. His articles have appeared in The International Herald-Tribune, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Slate, the Wilson Quarterly, and many other publications. He also received the 1996 American Library Association James Madison Award Citation for “defending the public’s right to know.”
PERVEZ AMIRALI HOODBHOY is professor of nuclear and high energy physics, as well as chairman, at the department of physics, Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad. He received his BS, MS, and Ph.D degrees from the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, and remains an active physicist who often lectures at US and European research laboratories and universities.
Dr. Hoodbhoy received the Baker Award for Electronics and the Abdus Salam Prize for Mathematics. Over a period of 25 years, Dr. Hoodbhoy created and anchored a series of television programs that dissected the problems of Pakistan’s education system, and two other series that aimed at bringing scientific concepts to ordinary members of the public.
He is the author of Islam and Science - Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality, now in seven languages. As the head of Mashal Books in Lahore, he leads a major translation effort to produce books in Urdu that promote modern thought, human rights, and emancipation of women.
In 2003 he was awarded UNESCO’s Kalinga Prize for the popularization of science. Also in 2003, Dr. Hoodbhoy was invited to the Pugwash Council. He is a sponsor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and a member of the Permanent Monitoring Panel on Terrorism of the World Federation of Scientists. Over the years, he produced and directed several documentary films that have been widely viewed on national television which deal with political, nuclear, and scientific matters. He is frequently invited to comment on these issues in Pakistani and international media.
In 2010, he is scheduled to receive the Joseph A. Burton Award from the American Physical Society and the Jean Mayer Award from Tufts University.
See a page depicting moments from his visit
GARY KNIGHT is a distinguished photojournalist who pioneered the launch of the VII Photo Agency in September 2001. Having worked in Southeast Asia and the former Yugoslavia, he followed the development of events in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. He was one of only a few non-embedded photographers covering the invasion of Iraq alongside the U.S. Marines. His work has been widely published by magazines all over the world and exhibited globally and he has initiated a broad education programme with universities and NGOs worldwide.
In June 2008, Knight launched a new quarterly magazine, dispatches. He is a 2009-10 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and taught “The Concerned Photographer” at Tufts through the IGL and Experimental College.