THOMAS M. KIRLIN, Ph.D.
Vice-President of Operations & Chief Financial Officer
Dr. Thomas Kirlin works with the President and Executive Vice-President to develop, fund and implement public policy and education programs for the non-partisan Center. As Vice President of Operations, he helps hire and train staff, monitors program performance, produces a monthly newsletter to Trustees, supports outreach and Congressional relations, and oversees CSP membership and subscriptions to Presidential Studies Quarterly. As Chief Financial Officer, he develops the annual budget, reviews project budgets and staffing, manages grants, administers daily financial transactions and oversees payroll, audits, accounts payable, benefits and contracts. He also leads an effort to acquire an integrated digital communications hub for the Center and is Acting Treasurer of the organization.
During his first three years at CSP, Dr. Kirlin directed the Center’s Presidential Fellows Program and a national student symposia that attracted 500 students from across the country. As director of the Presidential Fellows Program, he arranged briefings by the White House, Members of Congress, Ambassadors and policy experts at think tanks; oversaw research projects by Fellows; doubled the number of participating schools; and increased funding several fold.
Dr. Kirlin directs the Center program on innovation, science and technology that, to-date, has produced Marshalling Science, Bridging the Gap and Advancing Innovation: Improving the S&T Advisory Structure and Policy Process. This S&T program will expand to include health as the Center launches Agenda 2008, an initiative aimed at briefing Presidential candidates on a dozen issues critical to our nation’s future. He also directs the energy working group for Agenda 2008.
Dr. Kirlin is the editor of Dialogues on Presidential Leadership and The Character of George Washington, among other Center publications, and served as assistant editor of Triumphs and Tragedies of the Modern Presidency: Seventy-Six Case Studies in Presidential Leadership, 2001. He will help organize, edit and update additional case studies for 2008 Presidential candidates, members of Congress, top agency officials and the media.
Before joining the Center, Dr. Kirlin served for five years as an NGO delegate to UN climate change negotiations in London, Bonn, Berlin and Kyoto. Prior to that assignment, he provided educational and communications services to professional societies, including the American Association of Architects, the American Chemical Society, the American Bar Association, the U.S. Energy Association and the American Association for the Minority Enterprise Investment Companies, where he helped start an investment journal for which he later served as editor. For six years Dr. Kirlin produced and served as a panelist on “American Energy Update,” a national weekly radio show that attracted such guests as the Secretary of Energy, Senators, traditional and alternate energy producers, consumer groups and research organizations. The program was distributed to National Public Radio stations, among others, and reached 19 million listeners during its peak years.
In the early 1980s, Dr. Kirlin produced “Radio Guide to Computers,” which helped educate the first generation of users of personal computer. During these years he served as the first feature writer of Government Computer News and wrote a monthly column on artificial intelligence. On another project, he and three others converted a 700-page engineering manual for the first Hewlett-Packard touch-screen computer into a user-friendly guide to personal computing. The icons and language developed on that project have become the industry standard for PC manuals.
Before coming to Washington, DC, Dr. Kirlin taught humanities courses at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Clark College. He holds a Bachelor of Arts, with honors, from the University of Notre Dame, and a Master of Arts and Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Iowa. His post-doctoral work at Yale University was sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He also taught science fiction and fantasy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison while studying the history of 19th and 20th century physics and biology.
Contact Dr. Kirlin at 202-872-9800 or via e-mail.
