Alice P. Gast (Chair) (NAE) became Lehigh University’s 13th president on August 1, 2006. Previously she was the Robert T. Haslam Professor of Chemical Engineering, Vice President for Research, and Associate Provost at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to moving to MIT in 2001, she spent 16 years as a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford University and at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory. In her research she studies surface and interfacial phenomena, in particular the behavior of complex fluids. Some of her areas of research include colloidal aggregation and ordering, protein lipid interactions, and enzyme reactions at surfaces. In 1997 Dr. Gast coauthored the sixth edition of Physical Chemistry of Surfaces with Arthur Adamson. Professor Gast received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Southern California. After earning her Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Princeton University, Gast spent a postdoctoral year on a NATO fellowship at the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles in Paris. She returned there for a sabbatical as a Guggenheim Fellow. She was a 1999 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Technical University in Garching, Germany. She received the National Academy of Sciences Award for Initiative in Research, and the Colburn Award of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. Professor Gast has served on numerous advisory committees and boards, including the Board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the National Space Biomedical Research Institute Board of Directors. She is a member of the American Chemical Society, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and the American Physical Society.

David A. Relman (Vice Chair) is the Thomas C. and Joan M. Merigan Professor in the Departments of Medicine and of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University, and Chief of Infectious Diseases at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System in Palo Alto, California. He received an S.B. (Biology) from MIT (1977) and M.D. (magna cum laude) from Harvard Medical School (1982), completed his clinical training in internal medicine and infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, served as a postdoctoral fellow in microbiology at Stanford University, and joined the faculty at Stanford in 1994. Dr. Relman’s current research focus is the human indigenous microbiota (microbiome), and in particular the nature and mechanisms of variation in patterns of microbial diversity in the human body as a function of time (microbial succession) and space (biogeography within the host landscape) and in response to perturbation, e.g., antibiotics (community robustness and resilience). One of the goals of this work is to define the role of the human microbiome in health and disease. This research integrates theory and methods from ecology, population biology, environmental microbiology, genomics, and clinical medicine. During the past few decades, his research directions have also included pathogen discovery and the development of new strategies for identifying previously unrecognized microbial agents of disease. This work helped to spearhead the application of molecular methods to the diagnosis of infectious diseases in the 1990s. His research has emphasized the use of genomic approaches for exploring host-microbe relationships. Past scientific achievements include the description of a novel approach for identifying previously unknown pathogens, the identification of a number of new human microbial pathogens, including the agent of Whipple’s disease, and some of the most extensive and revealing analyses to date of the human indigenous microbial ecosystem. Dr. Relman advises the U.S. government as well as nongovernmental organizations in matters pertaining to microbiology, emerging infectious diseases, and biosecurity. He currently serves as Chair of the Institute of Medicine’s Forum on Microbial Threats (National Academy of Sciences), a member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), and a member of the Physical and Life Sciences Directorate Review Committee for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and advises several U.S. government departments and agencies on matters related to pathogen diversity, the future life sciences landscape, and the nature of present and future biological threats. He has served as Chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (National Institutes of Health [NIH]) and member of the Board of Directors, Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA). Dr. Relman cochaired a three-year National Research Council study that produced a widely cited report entitled Globalization, Biosecurity, and the Future of the Life Sciences (2006). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and a member of the Association of American Physicians. Dr. Relman received the Squibb Award from the IDSA in 2001 and was the recipient of both the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award and the Distinguished Clinical Scientist Award from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation in 2006.

Arturo Casadevall is the Leo and Julia Forchheimer Professor of Microbiology and Immunology and Chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is also a Professor in the Department of Medicine. He received his B.A. from Queens College, CUNY, and M.S., M.D., and Ph.D. degrees from New York University. His laboratory has a multidisciplinary research program spanning several areas of basic immunology and microbiology to address general questions in these areas, resulting in over 460 publications. His laboratory studies are focused on two microbes: the fungus Cryptococcus neoformans, a ubiquitous environmental microbe that is a frequent cause of disease in immunocompromised individuals, and Bacillus anthracis, which is a major agent of biological warfare. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and has been elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation, to the American Association of Physicians, and as a fellow of AAAS. Dr. Casadevall has served on numerous NIH advisory committees including study sections, strategic planning for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and the blue ribbon panel on response to bioterrorism. He currently cochairs the NIAID Board of Scientific Counselors and is a member of the NSABB. He is the founding editor of the first American Society of Microbiology (ASM) general journal, mBio, serves on the editorial boards of several journals, and has been the recipient of numerous awards, most recently the Solomon A. Berson Medical Alumni Achievement Award in Basic Science-NYU School of Medicine 2005, IDSA Kass Lecturer in 2008, and the ASM William Hinton Award for mentoring scientists from underrepresented groups.

Nancy D. Connell is professor of medicine at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ)-New Jersey Medical School. She is also director of the UMDNJ Center for BioDefense, which was established in 1999 for research into the detection and diagnosis of biological warfare agents and biodefense preparedness. Dr. Connell also is director of the Biosafety Level 3 Facility of UMDNJ’s Center for the Study of Emerging and Re-emerging Pathogens and chairs the university’s Institutional Biosafety Committee. She is past chair of NIH’s Center for Scientific Review Study Section HIBP (Host Interactions with Bacterial Pathogens), which reviews bacterial pathogenesis submissions to NIAID. She is current chair of the F13 infectious diseases and microbiology fellowship panel. Dr. Connell’s involvement in biological weapons control began in 1984, when she was chair of the Committee on the Military Use of Biological Research, a subcommittee of the Council for Responsible Genetics, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has worked with several international programs on dual use research issues and served on various NRC committees with her expertise in select agent microbiology, dual use, and biocontainment. Dr. Connell received her Ph.D. in microbial genetics from Harvard University. Her major research focus is the interaction between Mycobacterium tuberculosis and the macrophage.

Thomas V. Inglesby is CEO and Director of the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Associate Professor of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh Schools of Medicine and Public Health. He is an infectious disease physician by training. He is Coeditor in Chief of the peer-reviewed journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science and has authored a number of widely cited publications on anthrax, smallpox, plague, and biosecurity issues related to medicine and hospital preparedness, public health, science, pandemic planning, and national security. He is a principal editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association book entitled Bioterrorism: Guidelines for Medical and Public Health Management. Dr. Inglesby was a principal designer, author, and controller of the widely recognized Atlantic Storm exercise of 2005 and of the Dark Winter smallpox exercise of 2001. He has served in advisory and consultative capacities for government, scientific organizations, and academia on issues related to biosecurity, providing briefings for officials in the administration and for congressional members and staff; serving on a task force of the Defense Science Board of the Department of Defense and a committee of the US National Research Council; and participating in an advisory capacity to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, NIH, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Prior to helping establish the Center for Biosecurity in 2003, Dr. Inglesby was one of the founding members of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, where he served as Deputy Director from 2001 to 2003. He was also a faculty member of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine from 1999 to 2003. Dr. Inglesby is Board-certified in Infectious Diseases. He received a B.A. in 1988 from Georgetown University and an M.D. from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1992. He completed his internal medicine residency and Infectious Diseases Fellowship training at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and served as Assistant Chief of Service in the Johns Hopkins Department of Medicine in 1996 and 1997.

Murray V. Johnston is Professor of Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Delaware. He received a B.S. in chemistry from Bucknell University and Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the recipient of a Center for Advanced Study fellowship in 1999, the Outstanding Scholar Award in the College of Arts and Sciences in 2001, the Delaware Section Award of the American Chemical Society in 2003, and the Benjamin Y.H. Liu Award from the American Association for Aerosol Research in 2008. In 2007, he served on the National Research Council panel on Testing and Evaluation of Biological Standoff Detection Systems. Dr. Johnston’s research includes applications of mass spectrometry to a wide array of materials, from airborne particles to biological and polymeric macromolecules. He has used real-time single-particle mass spectrometry to study microchemical reactions within particles, heterogeneous reactions between gas-phase and particulate-phase species, and ambient particles at various urban sites. His current work emphasizes the use of photoionization aerosol mass spectrometry to characterize organic components of combustion and ambient aerosols, nano aerosol mass spectrometry to characterize individual nanoparticles and macromolecules smaller than about 30 nm, and conventional mass spectrometry to characterize oligomeric compounds in secondary organic aerosols. Dr. Johnston is a member of the editorial board of the journal Analytical Chemistry and the Board of Directors of the American Association for Aerosol Research. He has served as an ad hoc member of several NIH review panels associated with biological and environmental mass spectrometry.

Karen Kafadar is James H. Rudy Professor of Statistics and Physics at Indiana University. She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees from Stanford and her Ph.D. in Statistics from Princeton under John Tukey. Her research focuses on exploratory data analysis, robust methods, characterization of uncertainty in quantitative studies, and analysis of experimental data in the physical, chemical, biological, and engineering sciences. Prior to Indiana University, she was Professor and Chancellor’s Scholar in the Departments of Mathematical Sciences and Preventive Medicine and Biometrics at the University of ColoradoDenver; Fellow at the National Cancer Institute (cancer screening section); and Mathematical Statistician at Hewlett Packard Company (R&D laboratory for RF/microwave test equipment) and at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (where she continues as Guest Faculty Visitor on problems of measurement accuracy, experimental design, and data analysis). Previous engagements include consultancies in industry and government as well as visiting appointments at University of Bath, Virginia Tech, and Iowa State University. She has served on previous NRC committees and chaired the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics. She also serves on the editorial boards for several professional journals as Editor or Associate Editor and on the governing boards for the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the International Statistical Institute. She is an Elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the International Statistical Institute, has authored over 90 journal articles and book chapters, and has advised numerous M.S. and Ph.D. students.

Richard E. Lenski is the John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor of Microbial Ecology at Michigan State University. His research explores the genetic mechanisms and ecological processes that underlie evolution. While most evolutionary research uses the comparative method, Lenski pursues an experimental approach using bacteria. In an experiment started in 1988, Lenski and his team have watched 12 populations of E. coli evolve in the lab for more than 50,000 generations to investigate the phenotypic and genetic dynamics of adaptation and diversification. Lenski and his students have performed other experiments with microbes on the dynamics of host-parasite interactions, the evolution of mutation rates, and even social interactions. Lenski also collaborates with an interdisciplinary team on experiments using digital organisms—computer programs that replicate, mutate, compete, and evolve—to investigate the evolution of complexity. Professor Lenski received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1996 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2006.

Richard M. Losick is the Maria Moors Cabot Professor of Biology, a Harvard College Professor, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. He received his A.B. in Chemistry at Princeton University and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Upon completion of his graduate work, Professor Losick was named a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows when he began his studies on RNA polymerase and the regulation of gene transcription in bacteria. Professor Losick is a past Chairman of the Departments of Cellular and Developmental Biology and Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University. He received the Camille and Henry Dreyfuss Teacher-Scholar Award and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Philosophical Society, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, and a former Visiting Scholar of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. He is the 2007 recipient of the Selman A. Waksman Award of the National Academy of Sciences and a 2009 recipient of the Canada Gairdner Award.

Alice C. Mignerey is a nuclear chemist with research programs in basic nuclear science and in applications of the nuclear analytical technique of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) to environmental problems. Professor Mignerey’s basic nuclear research is focused on understanding the behavior of nuclear matter under conditions of extreme density (pressure) and temperature. These conditions are postulated to have existed just after the Big Bang, when the protons and neutrons had not yet formed from their constituent quarks and the gluons that hold them together. This so-called quark-gluon plasma has been predicted to be accessible through heavy ion reactions at high energies. The experimental program is centered at the Brookhaven National Laboratory Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) accelerator where colliding beams of nuclei reach center-of-mass energies of 200 AGeV, producing conditions mimicking those of the early universe. Professor Mignerey is a member of the Phobos and PHENIX Collaborations at RHIC and the CMS Heavy Ion Group at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The research program in AMS has concentrated on the uses of the cosmogenic nuclides, such as C-14 and Cl-36, to study groundwater and soil systems. Technique development is currently being carried out with researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory Trace Element AMS facility (TEAMS) to allow the dating of separate organic fractions in the organic C-14 carbon pool.

David L. Popham is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech. He teaches in the areas of microbial genetics and physiology. He directs a research program in the areas of bacterial endospore structure, content, germination, and resistance properties. Dr. Popham has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of California-Davis. He held postdoctoral research positions at the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique in Paris and at the University of Connecticut Health Science Center before joining the Virginia Tech faculty in 1996. He has over 20 years of experience in research on Bacillus subtilis cell wall synthesis, spore formation, and spore resistance properties. More recently his research has expanded into the content, structure, and germination of spores produced by B. anthracis, Clostridium difficile, and C. perfringens. Dr. Popham is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Bacteriology and Molecular Microbiology and has served as a member of six NIH grant review panels. He has served on the Environmental Protection Agency Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act Scientific Advisory Panel for the development of guidelines for the approval of sporicidal products.

Jed S. Rakoff has been a United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York since 1996. Prior to his appointment, he was a partner at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP. From 1980 to 1990, he was a partner at Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, Alexander & Ferdon LLP. Judge Rakoff was an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1973 to 1980 and chief of the Business and Securities Fraud Prosecutions Unit from 1978 to 1980. Before joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Judge Rakoff spent two years in private practice as an associate attorney at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP. He served as a law clerk to the Honorable Abraham L. Freedman, U.S. Court of Appeals, 3rd Circuit, in 1969-70. Judge Rakoff is coauthor of five books and author of more than 100 published articles, more than 300 speeches, and more than 650 judicial opinions. He has been a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School since 1988. He was a member of the Board of Managers, Swarthmore College, from 2004 to 2008. Judge Rakoff currently serves as a Trustee for the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation and a member of the Governance Board for the MacArthur Foundation Initiative on Law and Neuroscience. He is a member of the National Research Council Committee on the Development of the Third Edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence and chair of the Criminal Justice Advisory Board, Southern District of New York; the Second Circuit Bankruptcy Committee; and the Honors Committee of the New York City Bar Association. He is a Judicial Fellow at the American College of Trial Lawyers and was chair of the Downstate New York Chapter in 1993-94. Judge Rakoff is the former director of the New York Council of Defense Lawyers and former chair of the Criminal Law Committee, New York City Bar Association. He has been a Judicial Fellow at the American Board of Criminal Lawyers since 1995. Judge Rakoff received a B.A. from Swarthmore College in 1964, an M.Phil. from Oxford University in 1966, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1969. He was awarded honorary LL.D.s from Swarthmore College in 2003 and St. Francis University in 2005.

Robert C. Shaler obtained a doctoral degree in Biochemistry from the Pennsylvania State University in 1968 and then worked at the University of Pittsburgh as a professor of chemistry and at the Pittsburgh Crime Laboratory as a criminalist. His research resulted in the development of a bloodstain analysis system, the de facto standard in forensic laboratories until the early 1990s. The New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner beckoned in 1978. He directed the forensic serology laboratory and performed and directed forensic biological analyses in all New York City homicide investigations. In the wake of the World Trade Center (WTC) attacks on September 11, 2001, he assumed the responsibility for identifying the people who perished. He designed, organized, and implemented the DNA testing strategy that became the cornerstone for the majority of the identified victims. When the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner effort to identify the WTC victims paused, he accepted a professorship in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department and the directorship of the forensic science program at the Pennsylvania State University.

Elizabeth A. Thompson is a professor in the Department of Statistics and adjunct professor in the departments of Biostatistics and of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington, and Director of an Interdisciplinary Graduate Certificate program in Statistical Genetics. She received her B.A. in mathematics and Ph.D. in mathematical statistics from Cambridge University, UK, and did postdoctoral work in the Department of Genetics, Stanford University, before taking up a position on the faculty of the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge in 1976. She joined the faculty of the University of Washington in December 1985 as a professor of statistics and served as chair 1989-1994. Dr. Thompson’s research is in the development of methods for model-based likelihood inference from genetic data, particularly from data observed on large and complex pedigree structures both of humans and of other species, and including inference of relationships among individuals and among populations. Dr. Thompson is a recipient of a Doctor of Science degree from the University of Cambridge, the Jerome Sacks award for cross-disciplinary research from the National Institute for Statistical Science, the Weldon Prize for contributions to Biometric Science from Oxford University, UK, and a Guggenheim fellowship. She has served on the NRC Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics and on the Scientific Advisory Boards of the Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences, the Banff International Research Station, and the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics. She also serves on several committees of the International Biometric Society, including as a member of Council. Dr. Thompson is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences.

Kasthuri Venkateswaran is a senior research scientist at the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His 32 years of research encompass marine, food, and environmental microbiology. He has applied his research in molecular microbial analysis to better understand the ecological aspects of microbes, while conducting field studies in several extreme environments such as deep sea (2,500 m), pristine caves (3,000 m altitude), spacecraft (Mars Odyssey, Genesis, MER, Mars Express, Phoenix, MSL) assembly facility clean rooms (various NASA and European Space Agency facilities), as well as the space environment in Earth orbit (International Space Station). Of particular interest are microbe-environment interactions with emphasis on the environmental limits in which organisms can live. The results are used to model microbe-environment interactions with respect to microbial detection and the technologies to rapidly monitor them without cultivation. The bioinformatics databases generated by Dr. Venkateswaran are extremely useful in the development of biosensors. Further, these models or information in databases are extrapolated to what is known about the spacecraft surfaces and enclosed habitats in an attempt to determine forward contamination as well as develop countermeasures (develop cleaning and sterilization technologies) to control problematic microbial species. Specifically, his research into the analysis of clean room environments using state-of-the-art molecular analysis coupled with nucleic acid and protein-based microarrays will enable accurate interpretation of data and implementation of planetary protection policies of present missions, helping to set standards for future life-detection missions.

David R. Walt is Robinson Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. He received a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in Chemical Biology from SUNY at Stony Brook. His laboratory applies micro- and nanotechnology to urgent biological problems such as the analysis of genetic variation and the behavior of single cells, single molecule detection, as well as the practical application of arrays to the detection of explosives, chemical and biological warfare agents, and food and waterborne pathogens. Dr. Walt is the Scientific Founder and a Director of both Illumina Inc. and Quanterix Corp. He has received numerous national and international awards and honors for his fundamental and applied work in the field of optical sensors and arrays. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the AAAS. He has served on a number of NRC committees including the Committee on Review and Evaluation Methodology for Biological Point Detectors.