Mary Ellen Avery To Take Office
As New AAAS President

Mary Ellen Avery—renowned as a physician, scientist, and neonatologist—will take office as the AAAS president at the close of the Annual Meeting on 19 February 2003. Avery 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. She has been 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.

Avery noted that her background as a leader in child and maternal health will affect her leadership style at AAAS. "I certainly have beliefs and prejudices, and they will show," she said. "Women, children and newborns will not be ignored."

But, she says, her agenda goes beyond pediatrics. "My priorities are to support studies of global issues such as the increase in pollutants, efforts to have multilateral reduction in nuclear and microbial weapons, and the ever increasing socio-economic disparities in the world."

Read more in News & Notes.

16 January 2003