Appendix A
Biographical Sketches of Committee Members
John Vitko, Jr., Chair, has recently been named the director of Biological and Chemical Countermeasures for the newly created Department of Homeland Security. Dr. Vitko comes to that position from Sandia National Laboratories, where he has worked since receiving his Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University in 1975. Trained as a solid state physicist and spectroscopist, he has conducted basic and applied research in support of defense and energy programs; led a major portion of Sandia's Strategic Defense Programs in the 1980s; been the technical director of a multilaboratory DOE program on the use of unmanned aerospace vehicles for climate research in the 1990s; and played a formative role in many advanced detection technology programs at Sandia, ranging from lidars to a handheld suite of chromatography labs known as μChemLab. Since the late 1990s, Dr. Vitko has directed all of Sandia's chemical and biological defense programs and also served as coordinator for the detection thrust area of DOE's multilaboratory chemical and biological national security program and as the DOE representative to the multiagency ChemBio Detection Roadmapping Committee. In September 2002, he began working with and advising the transition planning team for the then-anticipated Department of Homeland Security, and upon creation of that department, took an assignment to direct its biological and chemical countermeasures portfolio. In that position, he and his staff are responsible for charting the vision and priorities for much of this nation's science and technology to counter and deter potential biological and chemical attacks against its population, infrastructure, and agriculture.
David R. Franz, Vice Chair, is chief biological scientist at the Midwest Research Institute, and serves as the director for the National Agricultural Biosecurity Center at Kansas State University and deputy director for the University of Alabama at Birmingham's Center for Disaster Preparedness. He served in the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command for 23 of his 27 years on active duty. Dr. Franz has served as both deputy commander and then commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) and as deputy commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Material Command. Prior to joining the Command, he served as group veterinarian for the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne). Dr. Franz served as chief inspector on three United Nations special commission biological warfare inspection missions to Iraq and as technical advisor on long-term monitoring. He also served as a member of the first two U.S./U.K. teams that visited Russia in support of the Trilateral Joint Statement on Biological Weapons and as a member of the Trilateral Experts Committee for biological weapons negotiations. Dr. Franz was technical editor for the Textbook of Military Medicine: Medical Aspects of Chemical and Biological Warfare, released in 1997. His current national-level committee appointments include the Defense Intelligence Agency Red Team Bio-Chem 2020; the Department of
Homeland Security Science and Technology Advisory Board; the Defense Threat Reduction Agency Threat Reduction Advisory Committee, Science and Technology Panel; the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Committee on the Control of Genomic Information; and the NAS Committee for Research with Russian Biological Institutes, which he chairs. He holds a D.V.M. from Kansas State University and a Ph.D. in physiology from Baylor College of Medicine.
Mark Alper received his A.B. degree with honors from Harvard College and his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California at Berkeley. He is deputy division director, Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL); director, Biomolecular Materials Program, LBNL; and adjunct professor, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Alper provides expertise in biochemistry and molecular biology. He is conducting research on various biosensor technologies, including a colorimetric biosensor and a magnetic biosensor based on a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID). He has held a number of other research management positions, including executive director, Chancellor's Biotechnology Council (University of California at Berkeley), and deputy director, Center for Advanced Materials (LBNL). Professor Alper founded the LBNL biomolecular materials program and has been director since its inception. In addition, he has most recently been chair, DOE Office of Fossil Energy, LBNL molecular foundry workshop on nanoscience and nanotechnology; co-chair, DOE Workshop on Impact of Biology on the Physical Sciences; member, Chancellor's Materials Council, University of California at Berkeley; symposium co-chair, Materials Research Society; co-organizer, DOE Office of Science Workshop on Complex and Collective Phenomena; editor, Report of the Workshop on Complex and Collective Phenomena, U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science; and participant, DOE Nanoscience/Nanotechnology Working Group. He was also a panel member on an NRC study examining materials research for 21st century defense needs.
Peter D.E. Biggins is currently the head of international research at Dstl, Chemical and Biological Sciences. Prior to that he was the technical manager for all aspects of research on biological and chemical detection, including data fusion. He has led teams working on operational analysis issues and the application of knowledge-based systems. He worked for the British Cast Iron Research Association on providing technical solutions for reducing air pollution arising from processes used in the iron and steel industry in both the workplace and the external environment. Dr. Biggins holds a B.Sc. (Hons) in biological sciences from London University, a M.Phil. in chemistry from the University of Aston in Birmingham, and a Ph.D. in atmospheric chemistry from Lancaster University.
Larry D. Brandt is manager of the Systems Research Department at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California. In that position, he oversees studies and computer modeling projects dealing with topics that include chemical and biological defense systems, nuclear weapons stockpile stewardship, infrastructure safety and reliability, strategic defense threat characterization, and Laboratory program guidance. He also leads Sandia participation in the PROTECT Domestic Demonstration and Application Program, one of the two principal demonstration programs within the DOE chemical and biological national security program. During his 30-year career at Sandia, Dr. Brandt has conducted or led systems analysis and program definition efforts addressing a wide range of topics, including design and effectiveness of the nuclear stockpile, strategic missile defense threat and architectures, and Laboratory strategic planning. In a 1987-1989 Washington, D.C., assignment, he established and led enduring systems threat development programs for the Strategic Defense Initiative Office (Phase One Engineering Team). During the 1993-1994 academic year, he conducted research in technologies and policies to counter WMD proliferation as a Carnegie Foundation Science Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Dr. Brandt holds M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University.
Cindy Bruckner-Lea is a staff scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). She received her bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the University of California at Davis in 1985 and a Ph.D. in bioengineering from the University of Utah in 1990. While a graduate student at the University of
Utah, she developed new methods for interfacing phospholipid bilayers with electrochemical sensors for biodetection. During the past 10 years at PNNL, she developed a microfluidic biosensor research program that has resulted in the development of renewable surface separation and sensing approaches for optically monitoring bacterial cells, studying DNA-protein interactions, automating the separation of protein complexes for mass spectrometry, and extracting and detecting DNA in environmental samples. Dr. Bruckner-Lea is currently serving as chair of the Sensor Division of the Electrochemical Society.
Harriet A. Burge was educated at San Francisco State University and the University of Michigan. She spent 25 years in the Allergy Division, Department of Internal Medicine, at the University of Michigan Medical School as a research scientist studying environmental aspects of allergic disease, especially with respect to fungal aerosols. After retiring as emeritus research scientist from that institution, she moved to the Harvard School of Public Health and has, over the past 10 years, developed a strong and unique program in aerobiology. Her research interests have continued to focus on allergy and asthma, especially in children, and she directs the exposure assessment parts of three large epidemiological studies evaluating causes for the increased incidence of acute asthma in children. A second large focus for Dr. Burge's research is in basic aerobiology, especially the study of survivability in aerosols of infectious disease agents, and the development of risk models to predict the efficacy of exposure control approaches.
Richard Ediger is director of new technology for PerkinElmer Analytical Instruments, where he has been employed for 28 years in technical and managerial positions. In his role as the primary internal guidepost for emerging measurement technologies, he has a long association with national laboratory initiatives in the chemical and biological weapons detection area. His position with PerkinElmer provides a perspective on some of the challenges of bringing promising detection systems into routine availability in a short time frame. For much of his career, he has been involved in a series of new technology assessment programs, utilizing chemical sensors for the past 8 years. His technical activities prior to that time were oriented to atomic spectroscopy. He is knowledgeable in sensor technologies such as surface acoustic wave sensors, microscale electrochemical devices for both vapor-phase and liquid compounds, integrated lab-on-a-chip systems, vapor preconcentrators for chip-based gas chromatography, DNA chips, and microscale high-performance liquid chromatography. He also has familiarity with mass spectrometry technologies used for vapor- and solution-phase sensing. Because many of his recent activities have related to the transfer of national laboratory technologies for the detection of chemical and biological warfare agents to the commercial marketplace, he is familiar with many of the candidate technologies and with their projected applicability to national security issues.
Mark A. Hollis received the B.S.E. degree with honors in electrical engineering from Duke University in 1979. He then entered graduate study in electrical engineering at Cornell University, where he received the M.S. degree in 1981 and the Ph.D. degree in 1983. His doctoral thesis work was on the fabrication and characterization of GaAs planar-doped barrier transistors. In 1978 and 1979 he was employed by the Health Effects Research Laboratory of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where he was involved in research on the biological effects of microwave radiation. While there, he designed and constructed an RF spectrometer for the measurement of the dielectric relaxation of biological molecules in aqueous solution. In 1983, he joined MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts, where he became engaged in the development of permeable base transistors and related vertical majority-carrier devices. He is now leader of the Biosensor and Molecular Technologies Group at Lincoln Laboratory as well as a research affiliate in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). At RLE, Dr. Hollis and his colleagues pioneered microelectronic devices called genosensors, which can determine the sequence of bases in DNA molecules placed directly on the microelectronic circuits. Dr. Hollis served in the past as an associate editor for the IEEE's Electron Device Letters and was responsible for the areas of field-effect transistors, quantum devices, and vacuum microelectronics. He served as chairman of the 1993 International Vacuum Microelectronics Conference in July 1993 and was also a member of the Instrumentation Advisory Committee for the Center for Genome Research at the Whitehead Institute in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has published over 50 technical papers in engineering and biology and holds eight patents with several others pending. Some of these patents are in the area of DNA-chip technology, where he and his colleagues invented some of the basic concepts in this field.
Leo L. Laughlin is a senior research scientist with Battelle. He holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of New Hampshire, an M.S. in chemistry from Drexel University, and a B.S. in biology from Georgetown University. He has an unusually varied and extensive background with over 40 years' experience in all aspects of chemical and biological warfare, including defensive policy and doctrine development, chemical and biological agent and weapons threat evaluation, weapons testing, operational testing and evaluation of defense material, and research on the physiological and pharmacological effects of chemical warfare agents and therapeutic drugs. Dr. Laughlin has managed several other studies for the federal government in nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.
Raymond P. Mariella, Jr., received his B.A. from Rice University in Houston, Texas, where he graduated magna cum laude with a triple major in mathematics, chemistry, and chemical engineering. His undergraduate research advisor was R.F. Curl, Jr. He received his A.M. and Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Harvard University. His thesis advisors were Dudley Herschbach and William Klemperer. He taught physical chemistry at Harvard University for 1 year, was a visiting scientist in the physics department at MIT for 2 years with Ali Javan, and was a research fellow at the IBM research laboratory in San Jose for 1 year. He spent 10 years at the Allied-Signal Corporate Research Center before joining Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he has been for the past 14 years. He currently serves LLNL as the director of its Center for Microtechnology.
Andrew R. McFarland is a professor of mechanical engineering at Texas A&M University, where he teaches courses in thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and aerosol mechanics and conducts research in the general area of aerosol mechanics. He is a graduate of the University of Minnesota and has held faculty positions at that institution, at the University of Notre Dame, and at the University of Illinois. For several summers during the 1990s, he worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he and a collaborator from the laboratory developed methodology for single-point representative sampling of radionuclides from stacks and ducts of the nuclear industry. Under funding for the Army, his research group (the Aerosol Technology Laboratory, ATL) is developing methodologies for sampling, transporting, and collecting bioaerosols. Under funding from DOE facilities and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, ATL has developed shrouded probe nozzles for collecting representative samples on a continuous basis. Software has been developed for predicting the effectiveness of air sampling systems. His current effort under funding from DOE sources is primarily directed at modeling the mixing of contaminants and bulk flows in order to create conditions suitable for application of single-point, representative sampling and at modeling aerosol losses in components of transport systems.
R. Paul Schaudies is a nationally recognized expert in the fields of biological and chemical warfare defense. He has served on numerous national level advisory panels for the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Department of Energy. He has 14 years of bench research experience managing laboratories at Walter Reed, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and as a visiting scientist at the National Cancer Institute. He served for 13 years on active duty with the Army Medical Service Corps and separated from service at the rank of lieutenant colonel-select. Dr. Schaudies spent 4 years with the Defense Intelligence Agency as collections manager for biological and chemical defense technologies. As such, he initiated numerous intra-agency collaborations that resulted in accelerated product development in the area of biological warfare agent detection and identification. Dr. Schaudies is currently an assistant vice president and division manager of the Biological and Chemical Defense Division at SAIC. His division focuses in three major business areas: contract biomedical research, technology assessments, and scientific studies. Since joining SAIC, Dr. Schaudies has served on or chaired numerous technology review and advisory panels for U.S.
government agencies. Dr. Schaudies received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from Wake Forest University and his doctoral degree from Temple University School of Medicine in the Department of Biochemistry. He has authored 27 scientific manuscripts in the peer-reviewed literature, as well as three book chapters. Dr. Schaudies is active in both government and academic circles.
