Rhodes University—on the treatment of leukemia with thalidomide. Hatfill submitted his Ph.D. thesis for examination to Rhodes University in January 1995, but it was failed in November. Hatfill later claimed to have completed a Ph.D. degree in "molecular cell biology" at Rhodes, as well as a post-doctoral fellowship (1994–95) at the University of Oxford in England and three master's degrees (in microbial genetics, medical biochemistry, and experimental pathology), respectively. Some of these credentials have been seriously questioned or disputed. During a later investigation, officials at Rhodes maintained that their institution had never awarded him a Ph.D. In 2007, Hatfill's lawyer Tom Connolly – in his lawsuit against former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and the FBI – admitted that his client had “[p]uffed on his resume,” falsely claiming he had earned a PhD and had “[f]orged a diploma” for the PhD. Back in the United States, another of Hatfill's post-doctoral appointments commenced at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1995. He then worked in 1997 to 1999 as a civilian researcher at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), the U.S. Department of Defense's medical research institute for biological warfare (BW) defense at Fort Detrick, Frederick, Maryland. There, he studied, under a National Research Council fellowship, new drug treatments for the Ebola virus and became an authority on BW defense. Anthrax attacks In January 1999 Hatfill transferred to a "consulting job" at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), which has a "sprawling campus" in nearby McLean, Virginia. The corporation did work for a multitude of federal agencies. Many projects were classified. Hatfill designed BW defense training curricula for government agencies. By this time there had been a number of hoax anthrax mailings in the United States. Hatfill and his collaborator, SAIC vice president Joseph Soukup, commissioned William C. Patrick, retired head of the old US bioweapons program (who had also been a mentor of Hatfill) to write a report on the possibilities of terrorist anthrax mailing attacks. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg (director of the Federation of American Scientists' biochem weapons working group in 2002) said that the report was commissioned "under a CIA contract to SAIC". But SAIC said Hatfill and Soukup had commissioned it there was no outside client. The resulting report, dated February 1999, was subsequently seen by some as