National Security and the LGBT Community
Dr. Matthew Allen, Sandia National Laboratories
In appreciation of PRIDE, Dr. Matthew Allen of Sandia National Laboratories leads discussion on being LGBT+ in a National Security Agency. From the Lavender Scare of the 1950's to today, LGBT+ professionals in national security have fought a long battle for the privilege of serving their country. Dr. Allen provides a brief overview of what is meant by "national security", a historical discussion of the legal barriers barring LGBT+ professionals from serving in national security, lifting of those barriers in recent times, and struggles that exist today.
Matthew Allen has been an engineer at Sandia National Laboratories for seventeen years. He received his PhD in Nuclear Engineering from UC Berkeley in 2004 for his thesis on "Ion acceleration from the interaction of high-power lasers with thin foils." He spent one year as a Fulbright scholar at the Institute for Laser Engineering at University of Osaka in Japan. He graduated from the University of Rochester in 1997 with a BS in Optics.