The global COVID-19 crisis will require scientists and scholars who are educated and trained to take on the world’s most dangerous problems. The Biodefense program at the Schar School creates leaders in the field. Look for their stories on this page in coming days.
It took six years—eight, if you count the two to get the master’s degree—for Craig Wiener to receive his PhD in Biodefense from the Schar School.
Along the way he commuted thousands of miles from home to class, worked full time for the U.S. government, served as teaching assistant to one of the country’s foremost national security experts and got married to a George Mason University alumna.
“Mason’s given me my wife, my friends, my mentors, my education and fulfilling national security work,” he said. “I’m very grateful.”
After completing his undergraduate degree at New York University and landing a job in Washington, D.C., the Manhattan native was drawn to the Schar School because of the interdisciplinary offerings in his field. He had an affinity for science—his master’s degree is in biodefense from the Schar School (his thesis was on synthetic biology)—and for national security.
“Mason had the only program of its type in the world that offered a PhD in Biodefense that dealt with both the scientific aspects as well as the policy and nonproliferation and counter-proliferation aspects of CBRN.” CBRN is an acronym for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear warfare.
Meanwhile, in addition to commuting from his then-home in Winchester, Va., to Mason’s Arlington Campus, and working full time at the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, Wiener was accepted as a nuclear scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “the number-one think tank for national security and defense in the world,” he said.
Wiener’s PhD dissertation, “Penetrate, Exploit, Disrupt, Destroy: The Rise of Computer Network Operations as a Major Military Innovation,” is “groundbreaking,” said Gregory Koblentz, director of Mason’s biodefense graduate program, and it has nothing to do with biodefense.
Wiener connected some rather complicated dots in determining the origins of computer network exploitation and computer network attacks in the U.S. intelligence community.
“I’ve established that computer network operations are a major military innovation, and it was developed by the U.S. intelligence community…. It’s the first time the intelligence community has developed a weapon system,” said Wiener.
Koblentz said it’s usually the armed services that lead the way in military innovation, not the intelligence community. But Wiener’s use of newly declassified documents and new on-the-record interviews with NSA and CIA officials in his research was truly revolutionary, said Koblentz.
“The dissertation was a labor of love, and he had to fight an uphill battle within the bureaucracy to get access to the necessary materials to write it,” Koblentz added. “His persistence paid off. Craig’s dissertation will make a significant contribution to the history of cyber warfare and the academic literature on military innovation.”
In his off hours, such as they are, Wiener plays guitar, reads and spends time with his new wife, Rachel (Barnhill) Wiener, who graduated from the Schar School with a Master’s in Public Policy degree in 2014.
“She also came to Mason specifically for the nexus with intelligence professors,” Wiener said.