Sidney D Drell

Sidney D. Drell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of theoretical physics (emeritus) at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University. He also co-founded CISAC, and jointly directed it from 1983 to 1989. Drell, who served as SLAC's deputy director until retiring in 1998, is a theoretical physicist and arms control specialist. He has been active as an adviser to the executive and legislative branches of government on national security and defense technical issues for more than four decades. Drell is one of the original members of JASON, a group of academic scientists who consult for the government on issues of national importance, and a member of the governing board of LANS, which he currently manages, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Most recently, he was a member of the advisory committee to the National Nuclear Security Administration, and chaired the senior review board for the Intelligence Technology Innovation Center. Drell has served as chair of the Panel on Nuclear Weapons Safety of the House Armed Services Committee, the Technology Review Panel of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the U.C. President's Council that oversees Los Alamos, Lawrence Berkeley, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. From 1992 to 2001, Drell served as a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. He has also been a member of the Commission on Maintaining U.S. Nuclear Weapons Expertise and the President's Science Advisory Committee and has consulted for the National Security Council, the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. Drell received his AB from Princeton University, his PhD from the University of Illinois in physics. In addition to his daughter Persis, who directed Stanford’s accelerator laboratory for five years, he is survived by another daughter, Joanna Drell, and three grandchildren.