J P Perry Robinson

Trained in chemistry and law, Julian Robinson has conducted research in the fields of arms control and technology policy, with a continuing focus on problems associated with chemical and biological warfare. This is a subject on which he has published or presented some 460 papers and monographs since 1967, including much of the six volume SIPRI study The Problem of Chemical and Biological Warfare (1971-76), Effects of Weapons on Ecosystems (1979), Chemical Warfare Arms Control (1984), NATO Chemical Weapons Policy and Posture (1986), and The Problem of Chemical-Weapon Proliferation in the 1990s (1991). This work perhaps contributed to the successful conclusion of the 1972 Convention on the Prohibition of Biological Weapons and the 1993 Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

Professor Robinson has been active in the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs since 1968. He has served as an advisor or consultant to a variety of national and international organizations, governmental and nongovernmental, including the World Health Organization (WHO), other parts of the United Nations system, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the UK National Authority for the Chemical Weapons Convention, and the Commission of the European Communities. He is now retiring from directing the UK end of the Harvard Sussex Program, and since 1988 he has been editing, with his HSP co-director Matthew Meselson of Harvard University, one of the few journals in the field, The CBW Conventions Bulletin, published quarterly from Sussex. He served as Executive Editor of the WHO examination of the health aspects of chemical and biological weapons. He is a member of the Ad Hoc Committee on Advances in Technology and the Prevention of their Application to Next Generation Biowarfare Threats jointly convened in 2003 by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council of the US National Academies.

Select publications

Contact