Co-Chairs
Pablo G. Debenedetti, NAE, Princeton University
C. Dale Poulter, NAS, University of Utah

Members
Zhenan Bao, Stanford University
Robert Bergman, NAS, University of California, Berkeley
Henry E. Bryndza, E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company
Emily Carter, NAS, Princeton University
David Christianson, University of Pennsylvania
Mary Jane Hagenson, Chevron Phillips Chemical Company LLC
Carol J. Henry, Independent Consultant
Jill Hruby, Sandia National Laboratories
Michael C. Kerby, ExxonMobil Chemical Company
Charles E. Kolb, Aerodyne Research, Inc
Josef Michl, NAS, University of Colorado, Boulder
Sander G. Mills, Merck, Sharp, & Dohme Corporation
David Morse, Corning Incorporated
Robert E. Roberts, Institute for Defense Analyses
Darlene J.S. Solomon, Agilent Technologies
Jean Tom, Bristol-Myers Squibb
David Walt, NAE, Tufts University

Board Members Biographies


Dr. Zhenan Bao
Zhenan Bao received her Ph.D. degree in chemistry from The University of Chicago in 1995 and joined the Materials Research Department of Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, where she became a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in 2001. She joined the faculty of the Stanford Chemical Engineering Department in 2004.

In addition to her more than 100 refereed publications, she has filed more than 50 US patent applications with more than 30 of them awarded. She served as a member of Executive Board of Directors for the Materials Research Society and Executive Committee Member and Program Committee for the Polymer Materials Science and Engineering Divisions of the American Chemical Society. She is on the international advisory board for the journal of Advanced Functional Materials (2001-2005), Chemistry of Materials (2006-now) and Materials Today (2002-now).

She is a recipient of the American Chemical Society Team Innovation Award 2001, R&D 100 Award, and R&D Magazine's Editors Choice of the "Best of the Best" new technology for 2001. She has been selected in 2002 by the American Chemical Society Women Chemists Committee as one of the twelve "Outstanding Young Woman Scientist who is expected to make a substantial impact in chemistry during this century." She is also selected by MIT Technology Review magazine in 2003 as one of the top 100 young innovators for this century as well as the Sloan research fellow, 2006. In 2008, she was elected as a SPIE Fellow, and received the first Polymer International IUPAC award.

Dr. Robert Bergman
Robert Bergman received his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin in l966 under the direction of Jerome A. Berson. He spent l966-67 as a postdoctoral fellow in Ronald Breslow's laboratories at Columbia, and following that joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology. After ten years at Caltech he accepted a Professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, and a joint appointment at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; in 2002 he was appointed Gerald E.K. Branch Distinguished Professor at Berkeley. Among his honors are a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, a Dreyfus Foundation Teacher-Scholar Award, the American Chemical Society Award in Organometallic Chemistry, election to membership in the U. S. National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the U. S. Department of Energy E.O. Lawrence Award in Chemistry and the American Chemical Society Arthur C. Cope Award, and the Royal Society of Chemistry Sir Edward Frankland Prize Lectureship. Bergman has long been interested in exploratory and mechanistic studies in organic and organotransition metal chemistry. He is probably best known for his discovery of the thermal cyclization of cis-1,5-hexadiyne-3-enes to l,4-dehydrobenzene diradicals, a transformation that has been identified as a crucial DNA-cleaving reaction in several antibiotics that bind to nucleic acids, his discovery of the first soluble organometallic complexes that undergo intermolecular insertion of transition metals into the carbon-hydrogen bonds of alkanes, and his work on the synthesis and cycloaddition reactions of complexes with metal-heteroatom multiple bonds. His research has recently expanded to include application of carbon-hydrogen bond activation to problems in synthetic organic chemistry, nanovessel catalysis, and methods for the conversion of biomass to fuels and commodity chemicals.

Dr. Henry E. Bryndza
Henry E. Bryndza is the technology director for chemical sciences and engineering in DuPont Central Research and Development. Dr. Bryndza joined DuPont in 1981 and has held a variety of technology, planning, marketing, and business roles. He received his S.B. in chemistry from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he conducted research in physical and synthetic organic chemistry with C. G. Swain and D. S. Kemp. He received his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, where he did his thesis research on physical organometallic chemistry and catalysis with R. G. Bergman.

Dr. Emily Carter
Emily Carter is a theorist first known for her work combining ab initio quantum chemistry with dynamics and kinetics, especially as applied to surface chemistry. More recently, she merged quantum mechanics, applied mathematics, and solid state physics in her linear scaling orbital-free density functional theory (OF-DFT) that now handles tens to hundreds of thousands of atoms quantum mechanically, her embedded configuration interaction (ECI) and ab initio DFT+U theories that combine quantum chemistry with periodic DFT to treat electronic excited states and strongly correlated materials, and her linear scaling multi-reference CI method for molecules. She also has constructed quantum-based multiscale simulations of the mechanical response of materials. For the last decade or so, her applications focus has been to determine how materials fail due to chemical and mechanical effects (e.g., corrosion and stress), and how to optimally protect these materials against failure (e.g., by doping, alloying, or coating). At present, she is turning her attention toward materials design for energy applications, including exploring novel materials for solar energy conversion to electricity and water splitting, metal alloy design for fusion reactor walls, and optimization of lightweight metal alloys to improve vehicle fuel efficiency.

Professor Carter is the Founding Director of the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University and the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment, as well as Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Applied and Computational Mathematics. She is a theorist/computational scientist who works at the interfaces of a number of disciplines in science, mathematics, and engineering. Her current research is focused entirely on enabling discovery and design of molecules and materials for sustainable energy, including converting sunlight to electricity and fuels, providing clean electricity from solid oxide fuel cells, clean and efficient combustion of biofuels, and optimizing lightweight metal alloys for fuel-efficient vehicles. She received her B.S. in Chemistry from UC Berkeley in 1982 (Phi Beta Kappa) and her Ph.D. in Chemistry from Caltech in 1987.   After a year as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, she spent 16 years at UCLA as a Professor of Chemistry and later of Materials Science and Engineering before moving to Princeton in 2004. She holds courtesy appointments in Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, and three interdisciplinary institutes (PICSciE, PRISM, and PEI). The author of over 250 publications, she has delivered more than 400 invited lectures worldwide.  Her scholarly work has been recognized by a number of national and international honors from a variety of entities, including the American Chemical Society (ACS), the American Vacuum Society, the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science. She received the 2007 ACS Award for Computers in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research, was elected in 2008 to both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, and in 2009 was elected to the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.  You can learn more about her at http://carter.princeton.edu.

Dr. David Christianson

David Christianson is the Roy and Diana Vagelos Professor in Chemistry and Chemical Biology at the University of Pennsylvania. His lab’s research focuses on determining the structural aspects of the mechanisms of hydrolytic metalloenzymes such as the arginases. Dr. Christianson received a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He has received numerous awards including the Searle Scholar Award (1989-1992), the Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research (1989-1992), the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (1993-1994), the Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry (1999), and a Guggenheim Fellowship Award (2006-2009).

Dr. Pablo G. Debenedetti
Pablo G. Debenedetti is the Class of 1950 Professor in Engineering and Applied Science, Professor of Chemical Engineering, and Vice Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University. He served as Chair of Princeton's Chemical Engineering Department between 1996 and 2004. His research interests include the thermodynamics and statistical mechanics of liquids and glasses; water and aqueous solutions; protein thermodynamics; nucleation; and metastability. He is the author of one book, Metastable Liquids, and more than 180 scientific articles. Metastable Liquids was named "best scholarly book in Chemistry" by the Association of American Publishers (1997). Debenedetti's professional honors include the National Science Foundation's Presidential Young Investigator Award (1987), the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (1989), a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1991), the Professional Progress (1997) and Walker (2008) Awards from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the John M. Prausnitz Award in Applied Chemical Thermodynamics (2001), the Joel Henry Hildebrand Award in the Theoretical and Experimental Chemistry of Liquids from the American Chemical Society (2008), the Distinguished Teacher Award from Princeton's School of Engineering (2008), and the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching (2008), Princeton's highest distinction for teaching. In 2008 he was named one of the 100 Chemical Engineers of the Modern Era by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Mary Jane Hagenson
Mary Jane Hagenson is vice president, technology at Chevron Phillips Chemical Company LLC. She previously served as vice president of specialty chemicals and specialty plastics for Phillips Petroleum Company (now ConocoPhillips).  Before being named to that position in 1998, she was general manager of specialty chemicals. Dr. Hagenson began her career with Phillips in 1984 as a senior research scientist in research and development. In 1991, she became technology planning coordinator for R&D, and transitioned into the chemicals business group in 1992 as director of business analysis, then as product manager for specialty chemicals. Before joining Phillips, she had research assignments at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of Iowa, and Iowa State University. Dr. Hagenson received a bachelor of science degree in physics and mathematics in 1974, and master of science and doctorate degrees in biomedical engineering in 1976 and 1980, respectively, from Iowa State University. Dr. Hagenson has authored more than 20 technical papers and holds seven U.S. patents. In 1991 she was nominated for Phillips™ Inventor of the Year. 

Dr. Carol J. Henry
Carol J. Henry is an advisor and consultant to public and private organizations, focusing on issues in toxicology and risk assessment, public and environmental health, and domestic and international science and public policy. She retired as Vice President, Industry Performance Programs at the American Chemistry Council (ACC) in November 2007. She is a member of the Federal Advisory Committee for the National Children's Study, the Institute of Medicine Roundtable on Environmental Health Sciences, Research, and Medicine; Environmental Health Perspectives Editorial Board, the American College of Toxicology, of which she has been president; the Society of Toxicology; the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is President- Elect of the Chemical Society of Washington of the American Chemical Society and cochair of the Cyprus International Institute for Public Health and Environment in Association with the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Henry received her undergraduate degree in chemistry from the University of Minnesota and doctorate in microbiology from the University of Pittsburgh. She is a diplomate of the American Board of Toxicology, certified in general toxicology.

Dr. Jill Hruby
Jill Hruby is the Sandia National Laboratories vice president for Energy, Security and Defense Technologies. The Energy, Security and Defense Technologies organization primarily supports Sandia’s mission efforts in energy and resource systems research and development, nuclear power, environmental quality, the reduction of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the global threat of terrorism, and the protection of nuclear and other vital national assets. Dr. Hruby will also lead Sandia’s International, Homeland, and Nuclear Security Strategic Management Unit (SMU), including Sandia’s strategic initiative on nuclear security. This initiative focuses on all aspects of nuclear security including nonproliferation, technology support to arms control activity, global nuclear security and threat reduction, nuclear asset protection and detection and response to weapons of mass destruction. Most recently the director of Homeland Security and Defense Systems at Sandia’s Livermore, Calif., site, Hruby has been with Sandia for more than 25 years. She has served as Sandia’s director of Materials and Engineering Sciences, where she was responsible for materials research and development and microsystem fabrication and performance. Over the course of her Sandia career, she has also been actively engaged with nanoscience research, hydrogen storage, solar energy research, mechanical component design, thermal analysis and microfluidics.

Dr. Michael C. Kerby

Michael Kerby is the global chemical research manager for ExxonMobil Chemical. He joined ExxonMobil’s Process Development Laboratories in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1989. Over the last 20 years he has held a number of technical and management positions within ExxonMobil Research and Engineering, ExxonMobil Refining and Supply Company, and ExxonMobil Chemical Company. He holds 29 U.S. patents and was recently part of a team that was recognized with the American Chemical Society’s Heroes of Chemistry award for the development and commercialization of the Nebula catalyst used for producing cleaner diesel fuel. Michael C. Kerby received his Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from the University of Texas, Austin, and performed postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Charles E. Kolb
Charles E. Kolb, Jr. is the president and chief executive officer of Aerodyne Research, Inc. He joined Aerodyne as a Senior Research Scientist in 1971. At Aerodyne, his personal areas of research have included atmospheric and environmental chemistry, combustion chemistry, chemical lasers, materials chemistry, and the chemical physics of rocket and aircraft exhaust plumes. In the area of atmospheric and environmental chemistry, Dr. Kolb initiated Aerodyne's programs for the identification and quantification of sources and sinks of trace atmospheric gases and aerosols involved in regional and global pollution problems, as well as the development of spectral sensing techniques to quantify soil pollutants. He received a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Princeton University.

Dr. Josef Michl
Josef Michl received his M.S. in Chemistry in 1961 from Charles University, Prague and his Ph.D. (1965) from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. He became a full professor at the University of Utah and served as chairman from 1979-1984. From 1986-1990 he held the M. K. Collie-Welch Regents Chair in Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin and subsequently moved to the University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, where he is presently Professor of Chemistry. He has also held an appointment at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of Czech Academy of Sciences since 2006. The primary emphasis in his current research is centered around the use of a molecular-size construction set for the assembly and characterization of surface mounted molecular rotors, novel concepts in solar energy conversion, new structures and reactive intermediates in the chemistry of boron, silicon, and fluorine, catalysis with "naked" lithium cations, and the use of quantum chemical and experimental methods for better understanding of excited electronic states of saturated molecules.

Dr. Sander G. Mills

Sander Mills is a vice president in discovery and preclinical sciences, and global head of chemistry. His areas of responsibility include discovery chemistry, process chemistry, analytical chemistry, structural chemistry, and chemistry modeling and informatics. After graduating from Drew University, he completed his Ph.D. in organic chemistry in professor Peter Beak’s laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. He then carried out post-doctoral studies in the laboratories of professor Clayton H.Heathcock at the University of California, Berkeley as an NIH postdoctoral fellow. Dr. Mills joined Merck Research Laboratories in 1985 in the department of process research, and moved to the medicinal chemistry area in 1989. Dr. Mills' research at Merck has been wide-ranging, dealing with the design and synthesis of small molecules to treat asthma, pain, HIV infection, autoimmune diseases, and CNS disorders. In 1993 he was part of the team that discovered aprepitant ( EMEND®), which in 2003 became the first substance P antagonist marketed for the prevention of chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting. He and his group went on to identify fosaprepitant ( IVEMEND®), a water-soluble prodrug of aprepitant for parenteral administration, which gained regulatory approval in 2008. Dr. Mills has been an author or co-author on more than 90 papers in professional journals on drug design, synthetic organic chemistry and the biology of medicinally active substances. He has been an inventor or co-inventor on eighty U.S. patents covering an array of drug candidates and synthetic methods. He is a member of theOrganic Chemistry and Medicinal Chemistry Sections of the American Chemical Society, AAAS and Sigma Xi.

Dr. David Morse

David Morse joined Corning in 1976 in glass research. This work led to 19 patents and more than 20 publications. In 1985, he was named senior research associate. Morse was charged in 1985 with establishing the Optical Components Research Department, followed by a number of R&D management positions. He was appointed to his current position in May 2006. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, chairman of the McDonnell International Scholars Academy Board at Washington University in St. Louis, the Board of Industry Advisors of International Materials Institutes for New Functionality in Glass (MI-NFG) and the Cornell Scientific Advisory Board for the Energy Materials Center. Morse graduated from Bowdoin College magna cum laude in 1973 and was granted a doctorate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976. He was elected to the MIT chapter of Sigma Xi.

Dr. C. Dale Poulter
Dale Poulter is currently a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of Utah, where he focuses his research on the interface between chemistry and biology. His current work studies enzymes in the isoprenoid biosynthetic pathway and the pathways that catalyze activation and bond-forming reactions. He received is PhD degree in 1967 in organic photochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley under the direction of W.G. Dauben and moved to the University of Utah in 1969 after two years as a NIH Postdoctoral Fellow with S. Winstein. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Poulter is the author of countless papers and the recipient of many awards, among them the James Flack Norris Award and the Repligen Award from the American Chemical Society, the Rosenblatt Prize from the University of Utah, the NIH Merit Award, and the Governor's Medal for Science and Technology. Dr. Poulter also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Organic Chemistry, and has been on the editorial advisory boards of Chemical Reviews, Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry, and the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Not merely a sought-after lecturer and academician, Dr. Poulter was also a founding scientist of Acacia Biosciences, Inc., and Echelon Biosciences, Inc., both drug discovery companies.

Dr. Robert E. Roberts
Robert Roberts is the Director of the Science and Technology Policy Institute and Chief Scientist at the Institute for Defense Analyses. He is the former Vice President for Research and Director of IDA's Science and Technology Division. Before joining IDA, he spent several years with the Department of Energy, and prior to that, he was associate professor of chemistry at Indiana University. Dr. Roberts is founder, former director, and mentor for the IDA Defense Science Study Group, a program established to foster interest in national security issues among outstanding young professors of science and engineering. Dr. Roberts received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon), his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Wisconsin, and was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral research fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr. Darlene J.S. Solomon
Darlene J.S. Solomon is Agilent's Chief Technology Officer. Her responsibilities include developing the company's long-term technology strategy and overseeing the alignment of Agilent's objectives with its centralized research-and-development activities.

Solomon brings extensive experience in R&D and management to her current leadership role at Agilent. She joined Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in 1984 as a member of the technical staff, subsequently holding a variety of research and management positions there, including R&D manager for the Chemical and Biological Systems Department. She joined Agilent Technologies when the company was formed in 1999. Prior to being named to her current post, Solomon was Vice President and Director of Agilent Laboratories, which was preceeded by her dual role of director of the Life Sciences Technologies Laboratory within Agilent Labs, as well as senior director, research and development/technology, for Agilent's Life Sciences and Chemical Analysis business. Solomon received her bachelor's degree in chemistry from Stanford University, a doctorate in bioinorganic chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and completed Stanford University's Executive Development Program. With numerous patents and publications to her name, Solomon was inducted into the Women in Technology International's Hall of Fame in 2001, received the YWCA Tribute to Women and Industry Award in 2004, and named to Diversity Journal's Women Worth Watching in 2007 and to Corporate Board Member's 50 Top Women in Technology in 2008.

Solomon serves on multiple academic and government advisory and review boards, including the National Research Council Review Committee for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, California's Blue Ribbon Task Force on Nanotechnology (chair of R&D), NSF/NIST/NIBIB's Committee to Sustain America's Competitive Edge, and external advisory boards for the National Science Foundation Nanobiotechnology Center, A-STAR Board for Singapore Economic Development, Stanford University Interdisciplinary Biosciences Advisory Coucil and the US Army Science Board.

Dr. Jean Tom
Jean Tom received Bachelor degrees in chemistry and chemical engineering and graduated with a Masters degree in chemical engineering practice from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985. She joined Merck Research Laboratories in the area of process development and then returned to graduate school as an NSF Fellow in 1989. Dr. Tom received her Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 1993 from Princeton, under direction of Professor Debenedetti in the area of particle formation from supercritical solutions. After graduation she rejoined Merck where she led pilot plant operations and development projects. In 2006 she joined Bristol-Myers Squibb as Director of Development Engineering in Process R&D; a position she currently holds. Dr. Tom has had a role in eight pharmaceutical products currently marketed. 

Dr. David Walt
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 is world-renowned for its pioneering work that applies micro- and nano-technology 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 a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has served on a number of NRC committees including the Committee on Review and Evaluation Methodology for Biological Point Detectors.

This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under Award No. DE-FG02-07ER15872

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CHE-0925448