Edward Ifft is a retired member of the Senior Executive Service and has been involved in negotiating and implementing many of the key nuclear arms control agreements of the past 45 years. He has a PhD in physics from Ohio State University, where he was a National Science Foundation Fellow. Dr Ifft’s career was primarily in the State Department, with assignments in the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, NASA and the Department of Defense.
Early in his career, he served on the US delegations to the negotiations on SALT and TTBT. He then served as Senior State Department Representative to both the START and CTBT negotiations in Geneva. After START concluded, he became Deputy Director of the On-Site Inspection Agency (OSIA). When OSIA was incorporated into the new Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) in 1998, he became Senior Advisor and State Department liaison to DTRA. As a U.S. START Inspector, he participated in inspections of many sensitive military installations in the former Soviet Union. He also served as the last U.S. Commissioner (Acting) for the ABM Treaty until the U.S. withdrew from the Treaty in 2002. He participated in the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Field Exercises in Kazakhstan in 2008 and Jordan in 2014.
Dr Ifft is the author of many articles in scholarly journals published in the US, Europe and Russia, as well as of chapters in two books published by the United Nations. He is a member of several professional organisations, including the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the Institute for Nuclear Materials Management and the American Physical Society. He continued to work part-time as a member of the Foreign Service in the State Department until 2017 and was an Adjunct Professor in the Security Studies Program of the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University for 13 years. In 2010, he was an Annenberg Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and he is currently a Distinguished Visiting Fellow there.
His awards include the rank of Meritorious Executive in the Senior Executive Service, several Group Honor Awards from the State Department, the Exceptional Civilian Service Medal from the On-Site Inspection Agency and the Distinguished Civilian Service Medal from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
