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»Robin Copeland
Robin Copeland
- Position:
- Deputy Director of the Nonproliferation Program
- To Contact:
Send an Email to Robin Copeland
Robin Copeland has an extensive background in WMD non-proliferation, with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa regions. In her current position, Ms. Copeland works on a variety of projects in support of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) scientist engagement programs in Iraq and Libya.
Before joining CRDF, Ms. Copeland worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Moscow, designing and implementing a program to bring socio-economic development projects to weapons of mass destruction communities in support of insider threat reduction and counter-terrorism. She opened and ran the U.S. Department of Energy's Moscow Office in the 1990s where she worked closely with senior policy makers from the U.S. and Russian governments on a wide range of international security issues.
Since leaving the Department of Energy, Ms. Copeland has consulted for multiple public and private international organizations on a broad range of nonproliferation issues related to nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and missiles. She worked with the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Ms. Copeland lived in the United Kingdom for three years where she consulted for the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry's Russian nuclear weapons scientist redirection program. She was invited to join the official U.S.-U.K. Scoping Study team to develop recommendations on Libyan WMD scientist redirection. She has visited multiple Russian closed nuclear, chemical and biological weapons facilities and traveled on multiple occasions to Iraq and Libya.
When Ms. Copeland originally moved to Moscow in January 1993, she was a recognized expert in the oil and gas sectors of the Commonwealth of Independent States and traveled extensively throughout Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
Ms. Copeland received her master's degree in international security studies at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom, where she was also working with the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV). Her undergraduate degree is from Southern Methodist University.