David Biggs is a Visiting Research Fellow at UNU-CRIS.
David Biggs is a former U.S. Foreign Service Officer and Senior Policy Advisor who served for more than fifteen years in the foreign and civil service of the United States, most recently as the State Department's lead on research security and team lead in the Office of Science and Technology Cooperation, negotiating and overseeing bilateral science and technology agreements. He is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Security and Development Policy (ISDP), which is based in Stockholm, and holds a Juris Doctorate focused on Intellectual Property and International Law from the University of Minnesota Law School. His work sits at the intersection of science diplomacy, research security, and the governance of international scientific collaboration, and he has represented the United States in bilateral and multilateral research security and S&T policy discussions across G7, NATO, and OECD forums, among others.
During his Visiting Research Fellowship at UNU-CRIS, David Biggs will primarily work on the governance architecture of international science and research partnerships — examining how subnational actors, including university systems and regional governments, can build trusted, secure, and productive research relationships with partners across democratic allies in the current geopolitical environment. His research addresses three interconnected questions: how the binary framework of openness versus security that has come to dominate research security discourse can be replaced by a more nuanced and enabling model of research partnership integrity; how subnational entities can develop the institutional infrastructure — agreements, shared frameworks, due diligence tools — needed to anchor international scientific collaboration when federal-level engagement is compromised or constrained; and what the professional formation and operational perspective of career diplomats contributes to an understanding of science diplomacy that the existing literature, built almost entirely by scientists and science policy academic professionals, has systematically overlooked.
In collaboration with researchers within the ReLab research effort, David Biggs will contribute to ongoing work on the governance of transatlantic research relations, connecting his practitioner expertise in bilateral and multilateral S&T agreement negotiation to UNU-CRIS's comparative regional integration scholarship.