Major Fellowship Activities: Thompson worked with Sandy Spector on the Project on Congress and Nonproliferation examining the central role of Congress in setting and implementing U.S. nonproliferation policy. The project focused on several areas in which Congress affects U.S. policy regarding the nonproliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, including directive legislation, appropriations, authorizations, and oversight activities to determine which (if any) issues have broad bipartisan support. She helped create and maintain a web site on the confirmation status of Bush Administration appointees to nonproliferation-related positions. Similarly, she maintained a website listing Congressional testimony relevant to nonproliferation. She charted the different government agencies and departments with responsibilities toward researching, preventing and responding to terrorism with weapons of mass destruction. The chart was used as a visual aid in a three-day joint congressional hearing on terrorism. She coordinated logistics for a seminar entitled “U.S.-NATO Relations Regarding Missile Defense: Concepts, Architectures and Perspectives,” which received extensive coverage in newspapers and on C-SPAN, and took notes of the seminar for publication on their web site. She created and updated a power point presentation on Monterey Institute and CNS nuclear, chemical and biological projects and databases for use at Carnegie Non-proliferation Conference. She also researched Congressional legislation for reference in papers and presentations for Sandy Spector. She planned and organized the visit to DC of Dr. Alexei Arbatov, Russian Duma Defense Committee Deputy Chairman. She arranged meetings for Dr. Arbatov with members of Congress and several key Presidential aides including Condoleeza Rice and John Bolton. She researched some of Arbatov’s arms control articles and forwarded them to all appointments. She also organized talks by Dr. Siegfried Hecker, Senior Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Mohamed El Baradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Additionally, she planned and organized a luncheon with over 80 participants entitled, “Russian National Security at Home and Abroad.” She also prepared and summarized notes for several briefings on subjects ranging from the IAEA to Security at US nuclear labs and posted the notes on the web. She researched the motivations and types of BW and WMD terrorist groups for John Parachini and researched, fact-checked and edited a variety of papers and lectures prepared by Leonard Spector. At BASIC she researched export controls, Missile Technology Control Regime and National Missile Defense. She also attended coalition meetings for BASIC, planning sessions for European strategy against NMD, set up meetings with Congressional staff members, and wrote MTCR talking points and fact sheets.
Current Activities: Sharp is Chief Executive Officer of Education Quality Outcomes Standards. She was previously Executive Director of Shift: The Commission on Work, Workers, and Technology at New America/Bloomberg. Before that she served as deputy chief of staff to Senator Mark Warner where she focuses on a variety of issues including defense, telecom, and general leadership issues. She was previously Legislative Director for Senator Mark Pryor, where she advised the Senator, managed his legislative priorities and supervised a staff of 16 LAs, LCs, and fellows. She was previously the Staff Director of the Subcommittee on State, Local, and Private Sector Preparedness and Integration of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. In this capacity she oversaw Department of Homeland Security programs related to planning and preparedness, developed preparedness strategies and related legislation, and manages a busy Subcommittee office. She graduated from Duke University in 2006 with an MA in Political Science specializing in international security. She was a Legislative Assistant with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee focusing on energy security issues. At Duke, she was a teaching assistant for classes on International Security and International Relations, was the organizer of the Department of Political Science Speaker Series “Emerging Topics in International Relations” and a graduate student representative for the International Relations Faculty Search Committee. She also worked on a paper on nuclear command and control for the Center for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, a Swiss think tank that deals with civil-military relations. Previously, she was a Research Associate at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies where she worked on projects on nuclear, chemical and biological nonproliferation, and managed the CNS project on Congress and Nonproliferation.