by Daniel Schaffer (Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), Trieste, Italy)

Daniel Schaffer is the public information officer for the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics and the Third World Academy of Sciences. He was previously employed as director of communications at the University of Tennessee's Energy, Environment and Resources Center and as a writer and editor for the Tennessee Valley Authority. He has written on science and technology issues both in the developed and developing world for more than 15 years and was the Editor-in-Chief of Forum, a science policy journal published jointly by the University of Tennessee, TVA and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He has published scholarly books with Johns Hopkins University Press, Temple University Press and the University of Tennessee Press, and has written and produced television documentaries on science and public health issues that have aired on public television stations across the United States. He holds a Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University, USA.
 

For the past 20 years, the Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) has been at the forefront of efforts to promote science and science-based developments in the developing world. This history of TWAS, the first of its kind, seeks to examine the forces that led to the creation of the Academy and that have sustained its growth and development ever since. This is a history of an organization that has made a difference in the advancement of science in the developing world and one that has been operated largely by and for scientists from the South. It provides a unique perspective on the challenges and opportunities that have driven science in the South over the past two decades and offers a window on the progress that has been made and the enormous amount of work that still needs to be done.