 So most of my work is on nuclear weapons and nuclear arms control. So nuclear weapons, you know, most destructive weapons on earth, haven't been used in over 70 years, and what I try to think of as one of the goals of my research is let's make sure that these are never used. Arms control is one really great tool for doing that. It's a diplomatic pathway rather than a military one. The goals of arms control, it's not always about disarmament or getting rid of weapons, but it can be about promoting dialogue, promoting stability, promoting peace and trust building. So I don't know if that goes towards making the world a more peaceful or stable place, but I like to think it does and I hope that it does as well. My name is Dr. Heather Williams. I'm a lecturer in the Department of Defense Studies here at King's College, London. I also did my PhD at King's in the Department of War Studies, and I did my PhD on trust building in U.S.-Russia arms control, which is still the main area of my research and focus. So one of the biggest risks that I see with nuclear weapons is miscommunication and misperception, where we all tend to have an image or a tendency for mirror imaging and assuming that the messages that we're sending are going to be perfectly understood and assuming that we perfectly understand who we're sending those messages to. And that's often just not the case. So trying to get into the mind of your adversaries, but also getting to the mind of your allies and understanding different perspectives that might sometimes make you a bit uncomfortable, but that really can contribute towards increased stability and increased understanding with the ultimate objective of reducing risks. Before I took the lectureship at King's, I used to work in government, and I also worked at Chatham House. And when I went to work at Chatham House, I was engaging with a lot of advocacy organizations, non-governmental groups. So it's a really different crowd than what I was used to coming from government. And I remember when I was at Chatham House, what I would often do is in engaging with the NGOs, I would say, well, here's the government perspective. Here's what I think you're kind of missing in terms of what is the other side of the story. Since coming to King's, that's all been flipped around yet again. And I find now what I think is a really important role to play for academics is to present all the different sides of the story. So now I engage with governments pretty regularly. And in that role, I'm saying, well, here's the NGO perspective. Here's something that I think you're missing. One experience that was really important to me was a few months ago, I was giving some briefings over in Washington, D.C. And I was talking a lot about the European perspective. People were asking questions about Brexit, about how will this impact academia, but also what is the perception of President Trump's election? How is this going to impact on NATO? And I felt really privileged to be based in London, to be based in Europe, to be based at King's, and to have firsthand experience of those perceptions and being able to communicate those directly into a policy audience. That was a really great experience and seeing how your research and that desire to understand more perspectives, how that can feed into a broader discussion. Another way that I'm hopeful that my work has real-world impact is here at King's, we've just started a new master's program in arms control called Arms Control and International Security. And the goal of the program is pretty ambitious. We're trying to train the next generation of arms control practitioners. So the goal is to get a really diverse set of students from all over the world, different backgrounds, different nationalities, and to teach them arms control in theory, but also the practical side to it with the hope that they go off and work in the policy or NGO or academic community and that they can hopefully in the future continue to engage with each other in promoting arms control and cooperation on nuclear weapons issues. Public engagement with nuclear weapons is a constant challenge because they're so destructive and they haven't been used, but also I think people are sometimes intimidated about the idea of nuclear weapons and oh, there's all this science behind it. So I think the most important thing for academics working on this topic is to get out and to just try to engage, to try to break down some of that intimidation and to just expose other experts, policy makers, people in think tanks, NGOs, but also the next generation to nuclear weapons issues and just to start familiarizing the broader public with about these topics so that they understand it. One thing that I tried to do and I think people at King's do this extremely well is to publicly engage, give talks at think tanks. I really like looking at the agendas for Chatham House upcoming events and seeing quite a few of my King's colleagues on there or seeing them talk at the Munich Security Forum or in Washington D.C. or all over the world really and that's something that I think is so important and a really easy way to not just promote our research but to promote the issues that we're working on. Another topic that's really near and dear to my heart is engagement with the next generation of people, particularly in university or younger. In December of this year, I visited a sixth form girl's school in Portsmouth and met with a group of women there and they had said, you know, I never met a woman who had worked on defense issues before and that was just so rewarding and talking to them about here's what I do day to day, here are some nuclear weapons issues and getting them and their families kind of more familiar not just with the subject matter but also about career opportunities that they might want to consider. So getting people at an early age but also being based at a university you're constantly exposed to younger people and their questions and some of their own, their insecurities but also their ambitions and I think that engagement at that stage in their careers and being personable with them and making sure they're not intimidated by the subject matter I think that's one of the most important things that we can do here at King's.