Helen E. Purkitt (Professor)

Dr. Helen E. Purkitt, Professor of Political Science at the U.S. Naval Academy, is also a Research Associate at the Center for Technology and International Security at the National Defense University and Summer Scholar at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. After earning a Ph.D. at the University of Southern California, she joined the Political Science faculty at Texas Tech University where she was the Director of the International Relations Graduate Program. She has also worked as an analyst for the Office of the Secretary of Defense-African Affairs and served as a Co-Principal Investigator for an experimental study of political decision-making funded by a National Science Foundation. Her recent publications include Helen Purkitt and Stephen Burgess, South Africa's Weapons of Mass Destruction (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005) and Biosecurity Issues, and Ways to. Monitor Dual-Use Biotechnology. Trends in the Future, INSS Occasional Paper 61 (Colorado Springs, CO, 2005). She has served as editor for fifteen volumes of Dushkin/McGraw-Hill's Annual Edition: World Politics and has published several articles in social science journals. She frequently serves as a reviewer for the National Science Foundation, for professional journals, and has appeared as an guest expert on the television program, 60 Minutes.