• Global Affairs
• Advisory Board
• Gloria Duffy

Gloria Duffy

Gloria Duffy is President and CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, the nation’s largest and oldest public affairs forum, founded in 1903 and headquartered in San Francisco. Each year, The Club organizes some 500 speeches, panel discussions, conferences and debates on a range of public policy issues. With 18,000 members, The Club publishes The Commonwealth magazine and broadcasts its programs weekly on public radio and commercial stations around the country. This is the nation’s longest-running radio broadcast, on the air since 1924. Over its history, The Club has been the source of significant public policy innovations in California, and currently sponsors the Voices of Reform project, fostering a broad-based governance reform movement in California.

Dr. Duffy is also Chair of the Board of the U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation, in Arlington, Virginia. CRDF has raised and spent $246 million over the past 10 years, from both U.S. government and private sources, to employ weapons of mass destruction scientists worldwide on civilian research projects with American colleagues. CRDF combats the spread of critical scientific knowledge about weapons of mass destruction, as well as contributes to economic development and international scientific cooperation. The Foundation works in the 15 former Soviet countries, Libya, Iraq and other countries of proliferation concern.

Dr. Duffy served as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Special Coordinator for Cooperative Threat Reduction in the Clinton administration. She negotiated the denuclearization and dismantlement of the nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in the former Soviet countries of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan and administered $1.5 billion in U.S. assistance for those purposes. In 1995 she was awarded the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service.

Dr. Duffy holds Ph.D., M. Phil. and M.A. degrees from Columbia University and an A.B. magna cum laude from Occidental College in Los Angeles. She has founded and headed two international affairs organizations. She has also served in positions at the Rand Corporation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Arms Control Association, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Stanford University, and was the first executive director of Ploughshares Fund in San Francisco.