With a PhD in 1957 from Northwestern University, Norman Neureiter joined Humble Oil in Baytown, Texas. However, bitten by an international bug from a year as a Fulbright Scholar in Munich and a love of foreign languages, he moved in 1963 to the National Science Foundation to run a cooperative science program with Japan that had been initiated by President Kennedy. From there he joined the US Foreign Service, serving in Germany, and in 1967, he became the first US science attaché in Eastern Europe, a position that was based in Warsaw, Poland.
In 1969, he moved to the White House Office of Science and Technology
and worked in international affairs, playing a role in President Nixon’s
breakthroughs with both Russia and China.
He left government in 1973 and joined Texas Instruments, where a
23-year career in international business development culminated in the
position of Vice President of TI Asia based in Japan for five years. Retiring in 1996, he was a consultant until being appointed the first Science and Technology Adviser to the US
Secretary of State in 2000, serving briefly under Madeleine Albright
and then Colin Powell. In 2004 he joined the American Association for
the Advancement of Science, where he is now the Director of the Center
for Science, Technology and Security Policy, funded by the MacArthur
Foundation. Much of his life has been devoted to international
engagement and the belief that international S&T cooperation can be a
powerful instrument of a constructive foreign policy – America’s soft power at its best. He speaks German, Russian, Polish, French, Spanish, and Japanese, but alas, not Turkish.