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Review of the Department of Energy's Genomics: GTL Program (2006)

Chapter: Appendix A Committee Biographies

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2006. Review of the Department of Energy's Genomics: GTL Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11581.
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2006. Review of the Department of Energy's Genomics: GTL Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11581.
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2006. Review of the Department of Energy's Genomics: GTL Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11581.
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Appendix A
Committee Biographies

Jennie Hunter-Cevera (Chair), is the president of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute and has served in that position since October 1999. Before then, she was the director of the Center for Environmental Biotechnology at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL). She was cofounder of two small companies (the Biotic Network and Blue Sky Research) that did contract work for large pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and consulted for 5 years in a variety of biotechnology fields before working at LBL. She was employed at Cetus Corporation for 10 years, where she served as the director of fermentation, research and development, and before that, at E.R. Squibb and Sons as a research scientist. Dr. Hunter-Cevera holds a PhD in microbiology from Rutgers University and an MS in microbiology, and a BA in biology from West Virginia University. She has given more than 50 invited lectures and seven keynote lectures and is the author of several papers, chapters, and books, as well as the holder of two patents and one pending patent. She was elected to the American Academy of Microbiology in 1995, received the 1996 SIM Charles Porter Award, was elected as a SIM Fellow in 1997, and was the West Virginia University Nath Lecturer in 1999. She was honored by West Virginia University as the 2003 recipient of its Distinguished Alumni Award. She has been honored as one of Maryland’s Top 100 Women for 2003. Dr. Hunter-Cevera serves on Governor Ehrlich’s Technology Commission for the State of Maryland and was one of six members of the Governor’s Executive Council for Transition. In May 2004, she was the recipient of the USFCC/J. Roger Porter Award. Supported by the U.S. Federation for Culture Collections and the American Society for Microbiology, the award recognized Dr. Hunter-Cevera’s expertise in collecting, main-

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2006. Review of the Department of Energy's Genomics: GTL Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11581.
×

taining, and preserving microbial cultures. Dr. Hunter-Cevera serves as president of the International Marine Biotechnology Association.


Charles R. Cantor is a founder, chief scientific officer, and member of the Board of Directors at Sequenom, Inc. He is also founder of SelectX Pharmaceuticals, a drug-discovery company based in the Boston area. He is codirector of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology at Boston University, where he is a professor of biomedical engineering. Dr. Cantor has held positions at Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, and he was also director of the Human Genome Center of the Department of Energy at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. He has published more than 400 peer-reviewed articles and is co-author of a three-volume textbook on biophysical chemistry and the first textbook on genomics, The Science and Technology of the Human Genome Project. He has been granted more than 60 patents. He sits on the advisory boards of more than 20 national and international organizations and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.


Wah Chiu is the Alvin Romansky Professor of Biochemistry at Baylor College of Medicine. He is a leading investigator in the structural determination of macromolecular assemblies using electron cryomicroscopy. He directs the National Center for Macromolecular Imaging (http://ncmi.bcm.tmc.edu/), which is moving into new territories with computational and visualization techniques and is supported by the National Center for Research Resources. His group has deployed this imaging technology to study three-dimensional structures of viruses, chaperonins, ion channels, and actin bundles at unprecedented resolutions. Dr. Chiu is the founding director of a cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional PhD program in structural and computational biology and molecular biophysics (http://www.bcm.tmc.edu/scbmb/). He also served as the first chair of the Gulf Coast Consortia (http://www.gulfcoastconsortia.org), which promotes the collaboration of scientists at the interface between biomedicine and physical, chemical, mathematical, computational, and engineering sciences. Both those research and training organizations have faculty drawn from six academic institutions, including Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University, University of Houston, University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, MD Anderson Cancer Center, and University of Texas Galveston Medical Branch.


Douglas R. Cook is a professor in the department of plant pathology and the director of the CA&ES Genomics Facility at the University of California, Davis. He is also a professor in the graduate school in bioinformatics and genome research, Universität Bielefeld, Germany. Dr. Cook’s research involves the application of genomics, genetics, and molecular biology to study basic and applied issues in legumes and grapes. His specific research interests include regulatory mechanisms of the rhizobium-legume symbiosis, characterizing the determinants

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2006. Review of the Department of Energy's Genomics: GTL Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11581.
×

of disease resistance and susceptibility in grapes, genomic and molecular characterization of quality attributes in wine grapes, and translational genomics from model systems to crops in the legume family.


Eric W. Kaler is Elizabeth Inez Kelley Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Delaware. He is known for his distinguished study and applications of complex fluids, including advances in the understanding of surfactant mixtures in synthesis of new materials. Dr. Kaler has served on several National Research Council panels, including the subpanel for the National Institute of Standards and Technology Center for Neutron Research, which he chaired, and the panel for materials science and engineering. He was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2001. He was one of the first to receive a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, in 1984. He also received the Curtis W. McGraw Research Award from the American Society of Engineering Education in 1995 and the 1998 American Chemical Society Award in Colloid or Surface Chemistry. Dr. Kaler earned his PhD from the University of Minnesota.


Thomas Kalil received a BA in political science and international economics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and completed graduate work at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He is the special assistant to the chancellor for science and technology at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been charged with developing major new multidisciplinary research and education initiatives at the intersection of information technology, nanotechnology, microsystems, and biology. He will also help to develop a broad array of partnerships between two of the California Institutes of Science and Innovation (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and California Institute for Bioengineering, Biotechnology, and Quantitative Biomedical Research) and potential stakeholders in industry, government, foundations, and nonprofits. Previously, he served as the deputy assistant to President Clinton for technology and economic policy and deputy director of the White House National Economic Council (NEC). He was the NEC’s “point person” on varied technology and telecommunication issues, such as the liberalization of Cold War export controls, the allocation of spectrum for new wireless services, and investments in upgrading America’s high-technology workforce. He led a number of White House technology initiatives, such as those on nanotechnology, the next-generation Internet, bridging the digital divide, e-learning, increasing funding for long-term information technology research, making information technology more accessible to people with disabilities, and the growing imbalance between support for biomedical research and support for the physical sciences and engineering. He was also appointed by President Clinton to serve on the G-8 digital opportunity task force (dot force). He is the author of articles and op-ed pieces on

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2006. Review of the Department of Energy's Genomics: GTL Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11581.
×

science and technology policy, nanotechnology, nuclear strategy, U.S.-Japan trade negotiations, U.S.-Japan cooperation in science and technology, the National Information Infrastructure, distributed learning, and electronic commerce.


David Kingsbury is the deputy chief program officer at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. He received his PhD from the University of California, San Diego, and his BS and MS degrees from the University of Washington. From 1997 to 2003, he worked in the biotechnology industry at Chiron Corporation and later at Valigen in Paris, France. From 1992 to 1997, he was on the faculty at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he was an associate dean of the School of Medicine and the director of the Division of Biomedical Information Sciences, the Genome Data Base, and the Welch Biomedical Library. He also was the chief information officer for Johns Hopkins University. Before joining the Johns Hopkins University faculty, he was professor of microbiology at George Washington University. From 1984 to 1988, he served as the assistant director for Biological, Behavioral, and Social Sciences at the National Science Foundation (NSF), where he was acting director for several months in 1984. At the time of his appointment to NSF, he was a professor of virology at the University of California, Berkeley. While at NSF, he served as the chair of two White House committees on biotechnology policy and regulation. His research has focused on the genetics and biochemistry of viruses and more recently computational biology. He was the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Computational Biology and is the author of a review text in medical microbiology and nearly 100 research papers and reviews.


Claudia Neuhauser is a professor and head of the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior at the University of Minnesota. She received her PhD in mathematics from Cornell University after completing her undergraduate work in Heidelberg, Germany. Before joining the faculty of the University of Minnesota, Dr. Neuhauser served as a professor at the University of Southern California, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and the University of California, Davis. Dr. Neuhauser’s work on spatial stochastic processes addresses questions in population genetics, ecology, and evolution. Studies of genealogies under selection are focused on the development of methods for statistical tests for selection in spatially structured and unstructured populations. Work on spatial stochastic processes centers on mechanisms of coexistence in food webs, including disease dynamics. Mathematical models are used to investigate nonequilibrium dynamics after large-scale perturbations in natural and managed habitats with the goal of understanding their evolutionary and ecological consequences. Physiological models of phytoplankton, zooplankton, and bacteria are used to investigate ecosystem consequences of physiological tradeoffs.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2006. Review of the Department of Energy's Genomics: GTL Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11581.
×

Gregory A. Petsko is the Gyula and Katica Tauber Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacodynamics and the director of the Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center at Brandeis University. He was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 1995 and to the Institute of Medicine in 2001. He has developed low-temperature methods in protein crystallography and their use to study enzymatic mechanisms and has pioneered the study of protein dynamics in enzymatic reactions. For over 25 years, he has worked to understand how enzymes achieve their extraordinary catalytic power, developing crystallographic methods for direct observation of productive enzyme-substrate and enzyme-intermediate complexes that led to techniques for studying protein crystal structures at very low temperatures. Recently, he took a sabbatical in Ira Herskowitz’s laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco, learning yeast genetics to be able to combine the reductionist approach of biological chemistry with the whole-organism approach of genetics. He is a founding scientist of the combinatorial-chemistry company ArQule, Inc. He hopes to use genetic, biochemical, and biophysical tools to study structure-function relationships as they apply to in vivo and in vitro function.


Mariam Sticklen is a professor in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences at Michigan State University. Since 1987, she has supervised and advised over 160 scientists (BS, MS, PhD, and sabbatical professors). She has played advisory roles at the international board of trustees level and at the U.S. National Academies level. She is developing systems to eliminate or minimize human and environmental risks posed by transgenic crops. Her expertise includes production of biofuels-related industrial enzymes, polymers, and pharmaceuticals in transgenic plants. Her research activities also center on improvement of agricultural crops of developing countries (Africa, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey), development of crops that are tolerant to extreme abiotic factors (such as drought, high salinity, and low temperature), and reductions of pests and applications of hazardous pesticides through gene discovery, cloning, and genetic engineering.


Larry P. Walker is a professor of biological and environmental engineering at Cornell University. Dr. Walker did his undergraduate and graduate work at Michigan State University, receiving a BS in physics and an MS and a PhD in agricultural engineering. He joined the Cornell faculty in 1979. Dr. Walker’s research interests can be grouped into four categories: single-molecule detection and analysis to elucidate hydrolytic and synergistic mechanisms of cellulases acting on microcrystalline cellulose; modeling, analysis, and optimization of solid-state fermentation processes for the production of natural products; modeling and optimization of submerged fermentation processes for the production of enzymes and other products; and single-molecule detection and nanofabricated devices for use in molecular ecology studies of microbial communities in high-solids degra-

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2006. Review of the Department of Energy's Genomics: GTL Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11581.
×

dation processes. Dr. Walker’s research activities are inherently multidisciplinary, involving researchers from applied and engineering physics, civil and environmental engineering, molecular biology and genetics, microbiology, plant pathology and plant biology. In addition, Dr. Walker is coordinator of the Biomolecular Devices and Analysis Program, the director of the Northeast Sun Grant Initiative, a former member of the National Biomass Research and Development Technical Advisory Committee, and coeditor of Industrial Biotechnology.


Janet Westpheling is a professor in the Department of Genetics at the University of Georgia. She earned her PhD in 1980 from the John Innes Institute in Norwich, England. Her primary research involves the control of gene expression in Streptomyces with emphasis on the study of carbon use and primary metabolism, and the strategies used by bacteria to regulate genes involved in morphogenesis and antibiotic production. Streptomyces is of particular interest because it produces most of the natural-product antibiotics used in human and animal health care. Dr. Westpheling serves on the Journal of Bacteriology Editorial Board and was chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Microbial Stress Response in 1996. She serves as a member of the Scientific Advisory Boards of several biotechnology companies interested in natural-product drug discovery and is a consultant to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Dr. Westpheling participates annually in a course on fermentation technology offered by the Chemical Engineering Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2006. Review of the Department of Energy's Genomics: GTL Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11581.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2006. Review of the Department of Energy's Genomics: GTL Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11581.
×
Page 76
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2006. Review of the Department of Energy's Genomics: GTL Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11581.
×
Page 77
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2006. Review of the Department of Energy's Genomics: GTL Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11581.
×
Page 78
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2006. Review of the Department of Energy's Genomics: GTL Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11581.
×
Page 79
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2006. Review of the Department of Energy's Genomics: GTL Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11581.
×
Page 80
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2006. Review of the Department of Energy's Genomics: GTL Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11581.
×
Page 81
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2006. Review of the Department of Energy's Genomics: GTL Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11581.
×
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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) promotes scientific and technological innovation to advance the national, economic, and energy security of the United States. Recognizing the potential of microorganisms to offer new energy alternatives and remediate environmental contamination, DOE initiated the Genomes to Life program, now called Genomics: GTL, in 2000. The program aims to develop a predictive understanding of microbial systems that can be used to engineer systems for bioenergy production and environmental remediation, and to understand carbon cycling and sequestration. This report provides an evaluation of the program and its infrastructure plan. Overall, the report finds that GTL’s research has resulted in and promises to deliver many more scientific advancements that contribute to the achievement of DOE’s goals. However, the DOE’s current plan for building four independent facilities for protein production, molecular imaging, proteome analysis, and systems biology sequentially may not be the most cost-effective, efficient, and scientifically optimal way to provide this infrastructure. As an alternative, the report suggests constructing up to four institute-like facilities, each of which integrates the capabilities of all four of the originally planned facility types and focuses on one or two of DOE’s mission goals. The alternative infrastructure plan could have an especially high ratio of scientific benefit to cost because the need for technology will be directly tied to the biology goals of the program.

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