Undraa Agvaanluvsan, a CISAC visiting professor, has returned home after being appointed advisor to Mongolia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Gombojav Zandanshatar. She will work on nuclear-related issues as well as Northeast Asian security and U.S. affairs.

She recently completed her tenure as deputy director of the Institute for Strategic Studies of the National Security Council of Mongolia, and as director of the Mongolian-American Scientific Research Center (MonAme) in Ulaanbaatar, a center she helped establish that focuses on energy, the environment and mineral-processing technologies.

Undraa earned her bachelor’s (1994) and master’s (1995) degrees in physics from the National University of Mongolia, and a diploma in high energy physics in 1997 from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. Undraa earned her doctorate in 2002 from North Carolina State University in Raleigh, studying nuclear reactions and quantum chaos in nuclei. Following that, she conducted postdoctoral research work in the Nuclear Experimental Physics group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She has published and co-authored several dozen articles in peer-reviewed journals.

At Stanford, Undraa conducted research in nuclear energy policy and international security issues concurrent with the expansion of civilian nuclear energy. She also taught a course titled, “Contemporary Issues in Nuclear Energy Policy” in the International Policy Studies program.