M. V. Ramana is a visiting researcher at the Princeton Program on Science and Global Security (SGS) for spring 2024. He is the Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security and professor at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia. A physicist by training, he was a researcher at SGS (1998-2004 and 2009-2016) and at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development, Bangalore, India (2004-2009). He is the author of The Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India (2012) and Nuclear is not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change (forthcoming, 2024), and co-editor of Prisoners of the Nuclear Dream (2003). Ramana is a member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials, the Canadian Pugwash Group, the International Nuclear Risk Assessment Group, and the team that produces the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Physical Society’s Leo Szilard Award.
Research Interests
Ramana’s current research spans two broad streams of inquiry. One stream explores how institutions associated with nuclear weapons and more broadly military industries gain public legitimacy and receive large amounts of funding levels in democratic societies even in the face of a looming climate crisis and pressing national and global social needs. A second related set of questions explores how a capitalist political economy based on indefinite economic growth and material consumption constrains possibilities of equitably addressing the overlapping and cascading ecological and social crises confronting humanity.