President's Address:
Peter C. Agre, M.D.

AAAS President, and Director, Malaria Research Institute, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Md.

Agre shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Roderick MacKinnon of Rockefeller University for the discovery of aquaporins, the key proteins that transport water across cell membranes. Not long after receiving the Nobel Prize, Agre began working to extend his studies of aquaporins to malaria, addressing the question of whether or not aquaporins could be exploited as a means of treating or preventing the disease. Initial results led his laboratory to focus on malaria as its primary area of study. As director of the Malaria Research Center, he oversees 19 Hopkins faculty members who concentrate on advancing basic science to develop new methods in malaria prevention and treatment. Agre is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), chair of the NAS Committee on Human Rights, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received his B.A. degree in chemistry from Augsburg College and his M.D. degree from Johns Hopkins University.

Eric S. Lander, Ph.D.

Director, The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., and Co-Chair, President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), Washington, D.C.

Science and Technology in the First Year of the New Administration

Lander is widely known as one of the driving forces behind today's revolution in genomics, the study of all of the genes in an organism and how they function together in health and disease. He also is co-chair of President Obama's council of science and technology advisers. PCAST is an advisory group of the nation's leading scientists and engineers who directly advise the President and make policy recommendations in the many areas where understanding of science, technology, and innovation is key to strengthening the economy and forming policy. Lander also was one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project and is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine. Lander earned his B.A. degree in mathematics from Princeton University and Ph.D. degree in mathematics from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He also was an assistant and associate professor of managerial economics at the Harvard Business School.

Marcia McNutt, Ph.D.

Director, U.S. Geological Survey, and Science Adviser to the Secretary, U.S. Department of the Interior

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McNutt's appointment in 2009 marked a U.S. Geological Survey milestone—she is the first confirmed woman director in the agency's 130-year history. She directs a multi-disciplinary organization that focuses on biology, geography, geology, geospatial information, and water, and is dedicated to the timely, relevant, and impartial study of the landscape, natural resources, and the natural hazards that threaten Americans. Most recently she served as president and chief executive officer of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Her biography includes a broad range of research interests and numerous honors and awards. She has participated in 15 major oceanographic expeditions and served as chief scientist on more than half of them. She has published 90 peer-reviewed scientific articles. Her research has ranged from studies of ocean island volcanism in French Polynesia to continental break-up in the Western United States to uplift of the Tibet Plateau. McNutt studied geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and earned her Ph.D. degree there in earth sciences in 1978. She then spent three years with the USGS in Menlo Park, Calif., working on earthquake prediction. At MIT she was appointed the Griswold Professor of Geophysics and served as director of the Joint Program in Oceanography and Applied Ocean Science and Engineering. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a fellow of AAAS, American Geophysical Union, Geological Society of America, and International Association of Geodesy.

Carol W. Greider, Ph.D.

Daniel Nathans Professor and Director, Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, and Professor of Oncology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD

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Greider, one of the world's pioneering researchers on the structure of telomeres, was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences along with Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack W. Szostak. While a 23-year-old graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, working together with Blackburn, Greider discovered the enzyme telomerase and later, in her own lab, she cloned its RNA component. This work laid the foundation for studies that have linked telomerase and telomeres to human cancer and age-related degenerative disease. It represents another example of curiosity-driven basic research that has direct medical implications. Greider obtained her Ph.D. degree in molecular biology from UC Berkeley in 1987. She then went to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory where she ran a lab for 10 years studying telomerase. In 1997 she joined the department of molecular biology and genetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. Greider grew up in Davis, Calif., where her father was a physicist at the University of California. She credits her father for encouraging her to pursue what most excited her.