Former Australian prime minister John Howard has accepted AEI's invitation to deliver the sixth annual Irving Kristol Lecture. He will give the lecture and receive the Irving Kristol Award at the Institute's March 5 Annual Dinner. The award is given to an individual who has made notable intellectual or practical contributions to public policy and social welfare. Howard became Australia's twenty-fifth prime minister in 1996 and served for more than eleven years, after a career in Liberal Party politics that began at age eighteen.

Resident Scholar Robert W. Hahn

The Institute announces the AEI Center for Regulatory and Market Studies, which will now house all AEI research on regulation. Robert W. Hahn is the center's executive director. The new center debuted on December 18 at its annual Distinguished Lecture, delivered by Cass R. Sunstein on the origins of extremism.

AEI announced in December that Alan Howard, CEO of Brevan Howard Asset Management LLP, has joined the board of trustees.

The Institute welcomes three new visiting scholars through the National Research Initiative. Tomas Philipson of the University of Chicago will research health economics. David Weisbach of the University of Chicago Law School will work on tax policy, with a focus on carbon taxes. New York University's David Schoenbrod will research environmental law and policy.

Senior Fellow James K. Glassman

James K. Glassman was nominated in December to serve as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. He will coordinate the State Department's efforts to improve the U.S. image abroad, especially in the Middle East. Glassman is currently editor-in-chief of The American magazine and chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

David Frum's new book, Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again (Doubleday), debuted in December. Arguing that Republicans have stumbled by campaigning on issues that have lost their salience, Frum proposes a new, contemporary agenda for the conservative movement. For information about a book forum for Comeback, see here.

Hertog Fellow Leon R. Kass

The drive to find alternative methods of obtaining pluripotent stem cells appears to have met with success. In an article in The Weekly Standard, Robert George of Princeton University praises Leon R. Kass's contributions to the debate as chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics. "All along," George reports, "it was Dr. Kass who said that reprogramming methods would, if pursued vigorously, enable us to realize the full benefits of stem cell science while respecting human dignity."

To help the next president hit the ground running, former top White House advisers Lawrence B. Lindsey (an AEI visiting scholar) and Marc Sumerlin released What a President Should Know . . . but Most Learn Too Late (Rowman and Littlefield) in December. The book comprises memos to the new president dated January 20, 2009.

Radek Sikorski, a former resident fellow at AEI who studied Europe and led the Institute's New Atlantic Initiative, was named Poland's foreign minister after his party, Civic Platform, won the October parliamentary elections.

Australian Liberal Party leader Brendan Nelson

Brendan Nelson was elected leader of Australia's Liberal Party after November's election. He spoke at AEI in June 2006 about the U.S.-Australian alliance: "The reason that we fight alongside the United States and have done so in major conflicts--including the current one--is because we share your values."

Emily McClintock Ekins, a summer 2005 AEI intern, was chosen to ask a question in the November CNN/YouTube GOP debate. She quizzed the candidates on plans for discretionary spending cuts.

AEI mourns Elizabeth Brady Lurie, a noted philanthropist and businesswoman who died on November 21. Lurie supported the Institute generously for many years. In 1991, she endowed the W. H. Brady Program in Culture and Freedom in honor of her late father, himself a long-time supporter of AEI. Lurie's gifts continue to underwrite some of America's most original scholars and social critics, including Lynne V. Cheney, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Michael Novak, Sally Satel, Christina Hoff Sommers, and W. H. Brady Scholar Charles Murray.