Steve Fetter

Steve Fetter has been a professor in the School of Public Policy since 1988, serving as dean from 2005 to 2009. He also has served as associate provost and dean of the Graduate School and as associate provost for academic affairs. He is currently on sabbatical leave in the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zurich. 

Fetter is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on International Security and Arms Control and has served on Academy committees to assess U.S. nuclear weapon policy, effects of nuclear earth-penetrating warheads, monitoring nuclear weapons and nuclear materials, internationalization of the nuclear fuel cycle, conventional prompt global strike, geoengineering, ballistic missile defense, nuclear forensics, and nuclear terrorism. He is also a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists board of directors, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board, and the board of editors of Science and Global Security. 

Fetter has served in government on several occasions, including five years in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Obama administration, leading the national security and international affairs division and the environment and energy division. He also served as special assistant to assistant secretary of defense Ash Carter in the Clinton administration and in the State Department as an American Institute of Physics fellow and as a Council on Foreign Relations international affairs fellow. He has been a consultant to several US government agencies and was a member of the director of National Intelligence's Intelligence Science Board and the Department of Energy's Nuclear Energy Advisory Committee.  

In the past, Fetter has served as president of the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs, vice chairman of the Federation of American Scientists, acting director of the Center for Advanced Study of Language, and associate director of the Joint Global Change Research Institute. He has been a visiting fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, King College London’s Center for Science and Security Studies, Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, Harvard’s Center for Science and International Affairs, MIT’s Plasma Fusion Center, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. 

He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a recipient of the APS Leo Szilard Lectureship Award and the Joseph A. Burton Forum Award, the Federation of American Scientists' Hans Bethe Science in the Public Service award, and the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service. He has given over 200 invited lectures and has more than 120 publications, including articles in Foreign Affairs, International Security, Science, Nature, Scientific American, Science and Global Security, Nuclear Technology, Fusion Technology, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Washington Quarterly, and Arms Control Today. 

Fetter received a PhD in energy and resources from UC Berkeley in 1985 and a SB in physics from MIT in 1981. Born and raised in central Pennsylvania, he was the first member of his family to receive a high school diploma. He enjoys cooking, hiking, bicycling, and kayaking. He is married to Marie Fetter, a certified nurse-midwife; Emily is an attorney in the US Securities and Exchange Commission Division of Enforcement; son Max is an organic farmer in Maryland.