Rush Holt served as the 18th Chief Executive of AAAS from 2015 to 2019. He previously served in Congress as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives representing New Jersey for eight terms; a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study; assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory; an arms control expert at the U.S. State Department; a faculty member in physics at Swarthmore College; and an AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow.
William B. Bonvillian is a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Science Technology and Society and Political Science Departments, and senior director of special projects at MIT's Office of Digital Learning, directing a research project on workforce education. He began teaching science and technology policy at MIT in 2007 and has taught a course on innovation policy since 2017. From 2006 to 2017, he was director of the Washington, D.C. office of MIT. He served for seventeen years as a senior policy advisor in the U.S. Senate where his legislative efforts included science and technology policy and innovation issues. He is on the National Academies of Science standing committee for its Innovation Policy Forum, served for seven years on its Board on Science Education, and served on four Academies’ Committees. He chairs the AAAS Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy (COSEPP), is on the Board of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), and serves on the Advisory Council of the Mystic Seaport Museum. He has served on the American Public and Land Grant Universities (APLU) Commission on the Science and Mathematics Teaching Imperative (SMTI) and on the Governor of Connecticut's Panel on Transportation Finance. Early in his career, he served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary and Director of Congressional Affairs at the U.S. Department of Transportation, working on major transportation deregulation legislation.
Mike Castle is a former two-term governor, nine-term member of Congress, lieutenant governor, deputy attorney general, and state senator of his home state of Delaware. Currently a partner at the law firm DLA Piper, he served on the Financial Services, Intelligence, and Education and Workforce Committees during his tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives, and also led a number of Congressional caucuses. Since leaving office in January 2011, he has been honored by the Delaware Chamber of Commerce and the University of Delaware, and politicians of both parties have heralded Gov. Castle as a bipartisan leader. At DLA Piper, he works on financial issues, international trade, legislative affairs, and healthcare. He is the Board Chair for Research!America. He received his bachelors degree from Hamilton College and his law degree from Georgetown University.
Robert Cook-Deegan is a professor at Arizona State University in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, and with the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes. He founded and directed Duke’s Center for Genome Ethics, Law & Policy from 2002 to 2012 and the Duke-in-Washington program until 2016. Prior to that, he was with the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine from 1991 to 2002; the National Center for Human Genome Research from 1989 to 1990; and the congressional Office of Technology Assessment from 1982 to 1988. His research interests include science policy, health policy, biomedical research, cancer, and intellectual property. He is the author of The Gene Wars: Science, Politics, and the Human Genome and more than 250 other publications.
Juan E. Gilbert is the Andrew Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Professor and Chair of the Computer & Information Science & Engineering Department at the University of Florida where he leads the Human Experience Research Lab. He is also an ACM Fellow, an AAAS Fellow, a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, and a Senior Member of the IEEE. Dr. Gilbert is the inventor of Prime III, an open source, secure and accessible voting technology that has been used in numerous organization elections and recently in statewide elections in New Hampshire and Butler County, Ohio. Prime III is the only open-source voting system to be used in state, local and federal elections. Dr. Gilbert was a member of the National Academies Committee on the Future of Voting: Accessible, Reliable, Verifiable Technology that produced the report titled, “Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy.”
Heather Howard is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Health & Wellbeing and director of State Health and Value Strategies, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded program that provides technical assistance to support state efforts to enhance the value of health care by reforming the delivery of health care services. She served as New Jersey's commissioner of Health and Senior Services from 2008 to 2010, overseeing a cabinet-level agency with a budget of $3.5 billion and staff of 1,700 responsible for public health services, regulation of health care institutions, senior services, and health care policy and research. Howard served as Governor Jon Corzine's chief policy counsel and as Senator Corzine's chief of staff, as associate director of the White House Domestic Policy Council and senior policy advisor for First Lady Hillary Clinton, as an honors attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice's Antitrust Division Health Care Task Force, and for the U.S. House of Representatives. She received her law degree, cum laude, from the New York University School of Law, and her bachelors degree cum laude, from Duke University.
Kaye Husbands Fealing is the Dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She previously served as the chair of the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She specializes in science of science and innovation policy, the public value of research expenditures related to food safety, and the underrepresentation of women and minorities in STEM fields and workforce. Prior to her position at Georgia Tech, she was a professor in the Center for Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, and was also a study director at the National Academies. She was the William Brough professor of economics at Williams College, where she began her teaching career in 1989. She developed and was the inaugural program director for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Science of Science and Innovation Policy (SciSIP) program and co-chaired the Science of Science Policy Interagency Task Group, chartered by the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Policy Council. She also served as an economics program director at NSF and was a visiting scholar at MIT’s Center for Technology Policy and Industrial Development. She serves on the Executive Board of AAAS and is an honorary AAAS Fellow. She also currently serves on NSF’s Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering, the National Institutes of Health’s National Advisory General Medical Sciences Council, the National Academies panels on Review of the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer Programs at the Department of Energy, the National Academies panel on Reengineering the Census Bureau’s Annual Economic Surveys, and the Georgia Intellectual Property Alliance. She is a board member for the Center for Organization Research and Design at Arizona State University, and for the Society for Economic Measurement. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, and a bachelors degree in mathematics and economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
Richard A. Meserve, who served as chairman of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) from 1999 to 2003 following many years as a partner at Covington & Burling, is currently senior of counsel to the firm. He serves as president emeritus of the Carnegie Institution for Science, a non-profit entity that undertakes fundamental research on the frontiers of biology, earth sciences, and astronomy. He served as chairman of the NRC under Presidents Clinton and Bush and is currently chairman of the International Nuclear Safety Group chartered by the International Atomic Energy Agency and of the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering. He has served on numerous legal and scientific committees over the years, including many chartered by the National Academies. Among other affiliations, he is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Engineering, and he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the AAAS, and the American Physical Society. He serves on the board of directors of PG&E Corporation, is a member of an independent advisory board to UniStar Nuclear Energy, LLC, and is an Overseer of Harvard University.Prior to joining Covington & Burling in 1981, he served as legal counsel to President Carter's science and technology advisor.
Kate Stoll is a senior policy advisor with MIT in Washington, D.C. She focuses on health and space research including NIH, NASA, FDA, and their related Congressional committees. She was an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the NSF. She created the NSF Innovation in Graduate Education Challenge and is the co-executive editor of the publication The Power of Partnerships: A Guide from the NSF GK-12 Program. She is the co-founder of the AAAS program, Emerging Leaders In Science & Society, or ELISS, which prepares graduate and professional students to collaborate across boundaries to tackle complex challenges in society. Most recently, she served as an American Chemical Society Congressional Fellow with the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce under Ranking Member Henry Waxman. Kate received a bachelors degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Washington.
