Sonja D. Schmid

Sonja Schmid is a professor of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and serves as the co-director of the STS graduate program in Northern Virginia. For her first book, she studied the history and organization of the emerging Soviet nuclear industry. In other research, she traced the results of Soviet nuclear technology transfer to Central and East European nations that have since joined the European Union. She is particularly interested in examining the interface of national energy policies, technological choices, and nonproliferation concerns. For her most recent NSF-supported research project on the challenges of globalizing nuclear emergency response, she has worked with postdoctoral scholars Davide Orsini (2015-16, Ph.D. University of Michigan) and Başak Saraç Lesavre (2017-18, Ph.D. École des Mines, Paris), and has hosted a monthly speaker series (SIREN) that is now available as an online archive. She teaches courses in social studies of technology, science and technology policy, socio-cultural studies of risk, energy policy, and nuclear nonproliferation. Together with the Nuclear Engineering Program and the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech, she developed and launched an interdisciplinary graduate certificate in "Nuclear Science, Technology, and Policy".

She serves on the stakeholder committee for the university’s Strategic Growth Area “Policy,” and is a member of the newly founded Jean Monet Center for Excellence at Virginia Tech (the Center for European Union, Transatlantic, and Trans-European Space Studies), which offers her a prominent platform to advocate for and engage in international, in addition to interdisciplinary, collaboration in the nuclear field.

Before joining Virginia Tech, Sonja spent time as a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford, where she also taught in the STS Program, and at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, CA.