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Mary Ellen Avery
Past Board Chairman
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Area(s) of expertise: Pharmacology, neuroscience, pediatrics, more
Language(s) spoken: English
Contact Information:
202-326-6440
scipak@aaas.org
PIO Contact: Ginger Pinholster
202-326-6440
gpinhols@aaas.org
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Mary Ellen Avery, past president and board chairman of AAAS, is best known for her discovery in the 1950s that a lack of surface active agents in the lungs of newborn babies led to respiratory distress and caused many of them to die. One of four women in the class of 1952 at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, Avery was inspired to become a pediatrician while an undergraduate at Wheaton College in Norton, MA. She says that her research as a faculty member at Johns Hopkins, and later at McGill University and at Harvard, showed her the importance of a multidisciplinary approach to science and science policy. Avery was physician-in-chief at Children's Hospital from 1974 to 1985, Thomas Morgan Rotch Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard, and a council member of both the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences. In 1991, President George Bush awarded her the National Medal of Science for her work on respiratory distress in newborns.
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