Robert Kelley '67 and his wife, Kathleen, are part of the 2,200-member Secretariat of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that was recognized in October as co-recipient of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize. The organization members, who share the honor with agency Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei, were noted "for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is used in the safest possible way."

Bob is currently senior inspector for Operations B in the Department of Safeguards at the IAEA, one of six divisions in the agency. The IAEA promotes nuclear medicine, energy and safety in addition to its role in nuclear weapons nonproliferation.

Bob has been part of numerous high-profile and sometimes contro-versial nuclear weapons inspection programs, including the one in Iraq that was halted just prior to the U.S. invasion in 2003. Kathleen, who is British and is fluent in many languages, serves as a translator for the agency. They met while working at the IAEA, were married two and one-half years ago and live in Vienna, where the IAEA is headquartered.

Previously, Bob was deputy leader of the Iraq Action Team from 1992 to 1993 and from 2001 to 2004. He was part of the team that verified the destruction of South African nuclear weapons in 1993 and made the revelations in Libya in 2004. He directs the majority of the agency's evaluations of states in the Operations B region, which includes Africa, the Middle East, South Asia (including Iran, Pakistan and Bangladesh) and the Americas. It also includes non-European Union states in Europe and Russia.

Bob says the IAEA has several advantages over sovereign countries in carrying out verification and transparency inspections in the area of nuclear nonproliferation. The organization's diverse employees (90 different countries) provide many varied views, honor confidentiality and have tremendous access to virtually every country in the world to carry out inspections at nuclear facilities. "We have carried out highly intrusive inspections in places where single governments will never be able to go."

The organization is not dependent on one set of information providers, allowing it to access the resources of cooperating member states and "get a far broader range of information than we would if we were an agency of a single government."

The fact that the IAEA is purely technical is another reason for its success, Bob believes. "We try as hard as is humanly possible to only report on what is happening technically and to not ascribe intent or motives to the inspected parties. To the extent that we meet this challenge, the inspected parties realize we are only going to comment on relevant technical issues and not political science and speculation."

After his graduation as a physics major in 1967, Bob earned his master's degree in nuclear physics at the University of Missouri and worked at Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories. While at Mudd, Bob was a member of the Bates Aeronautics Program and remains in close contact with Iris Critchell, instructor of aeronautics emerita, and her husband, Howard ("Critch").

The starting cannon goes off, and Jocelyn Wong '03 jumps into the water of Wisconsin's Lake Monona to begin her third Ironman Triathlon. The 2.4-mile swim is just the beginning of this grueling endurance competition. Next is the 112-mile bike ride, followed by a 26.2-mile, marathon-length run. Contestants have 17 hours (7 a.m. to midnight) to complete the course.

Wong first became interested in the Ironman as a freshman at HMC when she and Joey (Kimball) Kimdon '00 biked from Claremont to Oceanside to watch Kimdon's flute teacher compete in an Ironman Triathlon there.

"After seeing so many people do it-crazy people, older people, average-looking people-I didn't see why I couldn't do it," Wong said.

In Wisconsin, Wong finishes the swim and begins the bicycle leg of the course. It's hot-temperatures will eventually reach the 90s-but she's been training all summer in Atlanta, where she's a master's student in prosthetics and orthotics at Georgia Tech.

"Competing in triathlons led me to prosthetics and orthotics. I want to help people be more active and do things others take for granted," Wong said.

Now, in her third Ironman, Wong completes the first two hours of the bike ride at a decent pace, but then the wind kicks up and slows her down. She has two goals for this race: to finish in less than 12 hours and to break the top five in either her age group (18-24) or the collegiate division. This is the Ironman Collegiate Championships; more than one hundred students from around the country are competing.

In fall 2002, while a senior at HMC, Wong competed in her first Ironman, also in Wisconsin. She did "all right for a first-timer," coming in 14th in her age group and 13th in the collegiate division.

"I remember sitting in the awards ceremony and seeing other girls go up-the top five go on stage. I was super jealous," Wong said.

Wong competed in her second Ironman in fall 2003, this time in Florida. She performed poorly due to an infection, and the experience turned her off Ironman distance events for more than a year. Eventually she realized she missed them.

"I knew that if I was going to get back into it, then I must really want to do it, and that it was going to be difficult no matter what," Wong said.

She finishes biking and begins to run on the hilly Wisconsin course. Competitors are walking around her, but she continues running.

"When the race gets hard, I think I need to be tough because I'm doing it for the kids," Wong said. She dedicated her race to the Amputees Coming Together (ACT) Children's Camp, where she volunteered during the summer. Wong collected pledges of more than $2,000 for the camp.

Toward the end of the run, Wong realizes that she might not make her goal of finishing in less than 12 hours, so she switches to her backup goal-to finish in the daylight. She crosses the finish line with a time of 12:08:18, seven minutes before sunset. This puts her third in her age group and first in the collegiate division.

"I got to go to the awards podium twice. I was pretty psyched," Wong said. "I didn't know I had won in collegiate until my dad called me an hour after I finished. My parents hardly ever get that excited about me doing sports. They're always telling me to study more."

Wong's next Ironman Triathlon will be in April in China. She hopes to qualify for the Ironman World Championship in Hawaii before she turns 25.