Physics alum navigates export contro To bring something in or out of the country means navigating a minefield of bureaucratic rules and regulations to comply with the policies of the U.S. government. Bethany Nelson is something of a minesweeper. Nelson is a UWM alumna who majored in physics. After graduating in 2007, she attended law school at UWMadison, earning her JD in 2010. Now she works in UW-Madison’s Export Control Office, helping faculty and researchers import and export the controlled materials they need to conduct their work. She sat down with Letters & Science to talk about her work. What, exactly, is an export control coordinator? The government has a list of items that they consider ‘controlled’ for national security purposes. This is anything from lasers, guns, and tanks, to stuff like Ebola, brucella, and some nasty biologicals, all the way down to certain cameras, certain night vision equipment, and certain centrifuges. Even laptops and phones have a very low level of control. The United States also has the ‘Deemed Exports’ rule. It states that if a foreign person has access to controlled technology in the United States, it is ‘deemed’ to have been exported to that person’s country’s citizenship. As you can imagine, most universities have a high population of foreign persons on campus. My job is to make sure that we are compliant with the large variety of rules and regulations across multiple different agencies.
Bethany Nelson BA, Physics - UW-Milwaukee (2007) JD, University of Madison Law School (2010)
Additionally, there are ‘restricted party lists’ that the U.S. government keeps which are essentially just lists of persons, governments, companies, or universities that we’re either not supposed to do business with, or can have only limited interaction with. Another aspect of my job is to make sure that we don’t violate anything on the lists.
cattle in Morocco than to keep them here, but trying to get the vaccines out was a really complicated process.
What kind of materials do you work with at UWMadison that need to go through export control? We have a lot of stuff like lasers and centrifuges. We have select agents like Ebola and H1N1 that come across our desk – well, not literally come across our desk. We’ve had night vision goggles, cameras, chemicals you name it. The controls lists contain thousands of items, many of them used in research so we’re across the board. One of the more unique ones was a place in Scandinavia that wanted to send some reindeer meat to campus to get some analysis done. There are sometimes bugs. We had to figure out how to get some vaccines to some cattle in Morocco because in theory it was cheaper to keep the 10 • IN FOCUS • June, 2020
Above: Bethany Nelson smiles with UW-Madison mascot Bucky at a Regulatory Fair in October 2019, an industry event hosted by UW-Madison.
Do you have a stand-out request you’ve been asked to handle? One of my favorites was when the Cartography Department wanted to purchase some maps for a book, and the maps were only available from the State Archive (of the Russian Federation) in Moscow. The State Archive asked for payment in the amount of $2,000 or so, but they would only accept payment through a particular bank that the Treasury Department says that U.S. citizens and companies may not use. So, there was a question of how to get the money there. I remember in a meeting saying, “Look, hand me a suitcase filled with the cash, and I’ll take it to the State Archives in Moscow and get the maps,” à la James Bond. That was roundly shot down as an option. We managed to get an exception from the Treasury Department, but that was a long, on-going thing, all for some maps.
