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Suggested Citation:"Appendix C - Speaker Biographies." National Research Council. 2009. The Role of the Life Sciences in Transforming America's Future: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12592.
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Page 18
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C - Speaker Biographies." National Research Council. 2009. The Role of the Life Sciences in Transforming America's Future: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12592.
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Page 19
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C - Speaker Biographies." National Research Council. 2009. The Role of the Life Sciences in Transforming America's Future: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12592.
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Page 20
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C - Speaker Biographies." National Research Council. 2009. The Role of the Life Sciences in Transforming America's Future: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12592.
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Page 21

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Prepublication Copy Appendix C - Speaker Biographies Dr. Ralph J. Cicerone is president of the National Academy of Sciences and chair of the National Research Council. He is an atmospheric chemist whose research on climate change has shaped science and environmental policy at the highest levels nationally and around the world. His research was recognized on the citation for the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry, and he has been consistently honored for his fundamental contributions to the understanding of greenhouse gases, ozone depletion, and human impact on the environment. The Franklin Institute named him the 1999 laureate of the Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science, one of the most prestigious American awards in science. While on the faculty at the University of California, Irvine, he served as founding chair of the Department of Earth System Science, then dean of the School of Physical Sciences, and subsequently chancellor before his election as president of the NAS. Dr. James Paul Collins received his B.S. from Manhattan College in 1969 and his Ph.D. from The University of Michigan in 1975. He is Virginia M. Ullman Professor of Natural History and the Environment in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University where he was chairman of the Zoology, then Biology Department from 1989 to 2002. He is currently on leave at NSF serving as Assistant Director for Biological Sciences. In addition to his obligations as Assistant Director, Collins is responsible for coordinating collaborations between NSF and other federal agencies as Chair of the Subcommittee on Biotechnology and co-Chair of the Interagency Working Group on Plant Genomics though the National Science and Technology Council. Dr. Collins’s research focus is host-pathogen biology and its relationship to population dynamics and species extinctions. The role of pathogens in the global decline of amphibians is the model system for this research. The intellectual and institutional factors that have shaped Ecology’s development as a science are also a focus of his research, as is the emerging research area of ecological ethics. Dr. Collins is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow of the Association for Women in Science. Dr. Raymond Lee Orbach is the Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy. Dr. Orbach is responsible for planning, coordinating and overseeing the Energy Department’s research and development programs and its 17 national laboratories, as well as the department’s scientific and engineering education activities. From 1992 to 2002, he served as Chancellor of the University of California (UC), Riverside. Dr. Orbach’s research in theoretical and experimental physics has resulted in the publication of more than 240 scientific articles. He has received numerous honors including two Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowships, a National Science Foundation Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship at Oxford University, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship at Tel Aviv University, the Joliot Curie Professorship at the Ecole Superieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielle de la Ville de Paris, and the Lorentz Professorship at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Orbach received his Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from the 18

Prepublication Copy California Institute of Technology in 1956. He received his Ph.D. degree in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1960. Dr. Thomas R. Cech obtained his B.A. in chemistry from Grinnell College and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and then engaged in postdoctoral research in the department of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1978 he joined the faculty of the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 1988 and Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry in 1990. The discovery by Dr. Cech and his research group of self-splicing RNA provided the first exception to the long-held belief that biological reactions are always catalyzed by proteins. In January 2000, Dr. Cech became president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the nation’s largest private biomedical research organization. Dr. Cech received the Heineken Prize of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award in 1988, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1989, and the National Medal of Science in 1995. In 1987 Dr. Cech was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and also awarded a lifetime professorship by the American Cancer Society. In April 2009, Dr. Cech will return full-time to the University of Colorado as the director of the Colorado Institute for Molecular Biotechnology. Dr. David Kingsbury is the Chief Program Officer, Science at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Prior to joining the Moore Foundation he worked in the biotechnology industry at Chiron Corporation. 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 held several other academic positions. Between 1984 and 1988 he served as the Assistant Director for Biological, Behavioral and Social Sciences at the National Science Foundation, where he was Acting Director for several months in 1984. At the time of his appointment to the NSF he was 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. Dr. Susan Hockfield has served as the sixteenth President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since December 2004. A noted neuroscientist whose research has focused on the development of the brain, Dr. Hockfield is the first life scientist to lead MIT. She holds a faculty appointment as Professor of Neuroscience in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Hockfield earned her Ph.D. from the Georgetown University School of Medicine, while carrying out her dissertation research in neuroscience at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). She was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at San Francisco, and then joined the scientific staff at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Before assuming the presidency of MIT, she was Provost at Yale University, where she had taught since 1985 and had also served as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She serves as a director of the General Electric Company; a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; an overseer of the Boston Symphony Orchestra; and a member of the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum. 19

Prepublication Copy Dr. Susan Hellmann is President of Product Development at Genentech, where she is responsible for Genentech’s Development, Process Research & Development, Business Development, Product Portfolio Management, Alliance Management and Pipeline Planning Support functions. She is a member of Genentech’s executive committee. Hellmann is also an adjunct associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She is board-certified in Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology and completed her clinical training at UCSF. Prior to joining Genentech, Hellmann was associate director of clinical cancer research at Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Pharmaceutical Research Institute, where she was the project team leader for Taxol. In July 2008, Hellmann was appointed to the California Academy of Sciences Board of Trustees. She was named to the Biotech Hall of Fame in 2007 and as Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association’s “Woman of the Year” for 2006. Hellmann was also named to FORTUNE magazine’s “Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Business” list in 2001 and each year from 2003 to 2008. Dr. Harold Varmus, former Director of the National Institutes of Health and co-recipient of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, has served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City since January 2000. Dr. Varmus received the Nobel Prize (jointly with Michael Bishop, his former colleague at the University of California, San Francisco) for the discovery of cellular genes that are progenitors of retroviral oncogenes. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine and has received the National Medal of Science, and the Vannevar Bush Award. Dr Varmus has been an advisor to the Federal government, pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms, and many academic institutions. He served on the World Health Organization’s Commission on Macroeconomics and Health from 2000 to 2002; is a co-founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Public Library of Science; chairs the Scientific Board of the Gates Foundation Grand Challenges in Global Health and leads the Advisory Committee for the Global Health Division; and is involved in initiatives to promote science in developing countries. His current research at the Sloan-Kettering Institute mainly addresses molecular mechanisms of oncogenesis, using mouse models of human cancer. Dr. Cynthia Kenyon is the Herbert Boyer Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics and American Cancer Society Professor at the University of California, San Francisco. In 1993, Kenyon and colleagues’ discovery that a single-gene mutation could double the lifespan of C. elegans sparked an intensive study of the molecular biology of aging. These findings have now led to the discovery that an evolutionarily conserved hormone signaling system controls aging in other organisms as well, including mammals. Dr. Kenyon is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine and she is a past president of the Genetics Society of America. She is now the director of the Hillblom Center for the Biology of Aging at UCSF. Cynthia Kenyon graduated valedictorian in chemistry and biochemistry from the University of Georgia in 1976 and received her PhD from MIT in 1981. 20

Prepublication Copy Dr. Lucy Shapiro is a professor and the founding chair of the Department of Developmental Biology and Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She is also director of Stanford’s Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine and is a member of the Spogli Institute for International Studies. Her research uses a systems engineering approach to define the genetic circuitry that links bacterial cell differentiation and cell cycle progression. She has shown that the bacterial cell is highly organized with internal structure and regulatory mechanisms that oscillate in time and space. Dr. Shapiro received an A.B. in fine arts in 1962 from Brooklyn College and a Ph.D. in molecular biology in 1966 from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Her many honors include FASEB’s Excellence in Science Award, the 2005 Waksman Award in Microbiology from the National Academy, and election to the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Robert T. Fraley oversees Monsanto’s integrated crop and seed agribusiness technology and research with facilities in most world areas. Dr. Fraley has held several positions at Monsanto, including Co-President of Monsanto’s Agricultural Sector and President of Monsanto’s Ceregen business unit with responsibilities for the discovery, development and commercialization of new crop chemical and biotechnology products. Author of more than 100 publications and patent applications relating to technical advances in agricultural biotechnology, Dr. Fraley received the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1999. He received the 2008 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Award for the Industrial Application of Science for his work on the improvement of crops through biotechnology. Dr. Fraley holds a PhD in microbiology/biochemistry from the University of Illinois and a Bachelor of Science from the University of Illinois. Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni served as director of the National Institutes of Health from May 2002 to October 2008. During his tenure he oversaw the completion of the doubling of the NIH budget and initiated the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research. Prior to joining the NIH, Dr. Zerhouni served as executive vice-dean of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, chair of the Russell H. Morgan department of radiology and radiological science, Martin Donner professor of radiology, and professor of biomedical engineering. Dr. Zerhouni was born in Nedroma, Algeria and earned his medical degree at the University of Algiers School of Medicine in 1975. In 2000, he was elected to the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine. Dr. Zerhouni has won several awards for his research including a Gold Medal from the American Roentgen Ray Society for CT research and two Paul Lauterbur Awards for MRI research. His research in imaging led to advances in Computerized Axial Tomography (CAT scanning) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) that resulted in 157 peer reviewed publications and 8 patents. 21

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