Speaker Biographies
(in alphabetical order)
D. Fennel Evans is the Director of the Center for Interfacial Engineering and Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of more than 180 publications on self-assembly processes in water and nonaqueous solvents, microemulsions, diffusion in liquids and micellar solutions, and characterization of surfaces using scanning probe techniques. He has published two textbooks "The Colloidal Domain" and "The Fundamentals of Interfacial Engineering."
Christopher T. Hill is Vice Provost for Research and Professor of Public Policy and Technology at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He teaches courses in science and technology policy, industrial R&D, and the logic of policy inquiry. His current research is on the impacts of cooperative R&D on participating firms. Before joining GMU in 1994, Dr. Hill was at the RAND Critical Technologies Institute in Washington, D.C. He has also held positions at the National Academy of Engineering, the Congressional Research Service, MIT, Washington University in St. Louis, the Office of Technology Assessment, and the Uniroyal Corporation. He holds the B.S. from the Illinois Institute of Technology and the M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, all in Chemical Engineering. He is a registered professional engineer in the State of Missouri, and he is a consultant to the New Energy Development Organization of Japan and to the Proctor and Gamble Company.
Nancy B. Jackson Nancy Jackson is a principle member of technical staff and Chair of the Catalysis Steering Committee at Sandia National Laboratories. For the past 4 years she has been responsible for Sandia’s program development in catalysis which has included organizing a workshop on the future of catalysis research needs for Vision 2020: The US Chemical Industry; a recent symposium on DOE laboratory catalysis research investigating partnerships within and among the laboratories; and a visit to several European catalysis organizations. She is also active in the American Chemical Society as chair-elect of the Catalysis Secretariat, immediate past chair of the Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Division, and a consultant to the Committee on Science.
Dr. Jackson’s research interests lie primarily in the area of structure-property relationships for heterogeneous catalytic materials and she has investigated metal, metal oxide and metal phosphate systems. Her work has included the study of a variety of catalytic processes including natural gas conversion to alternative fuels and commodity chemicals production. Her research often involves collaboration with universities and/or industrial firms.
Dr. Jackson has a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from George Washington University and a PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Texas, Austin. Prior to attending graduate school she held positions at the American Chemical Society, a US Senate staff, and the American Foreign Service Association at the US State Department. She is active in issues regarding Native American education and is now chair of the ACS Committee on Minority Affairs. Jointly with her position at Sandia, she is presently an associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Nuclear Engineering at the University of New Mexico and serves on numerous advisory and editorial boards.
Henry T. (Hank) Kohlbrand is director of external technology and intellectual asset management for The Dow Chemical Company. He is one of eight directors responsible for corporate R&D at Dow. Hank assumed this position in 1997 and is responsible for Dow's external R&D programs, offices of science & technology in Europe and Japan, and the intellectual asset management technology center. Previous responsibilities included: Corporate director of Waste Elimination, R&D director for Engineering Science and Process Development, and director of the Central Research Engineering Laboratory. Over his career he has worked in a number of research and manufacturing roles. In addition, he is recognized as an international expert in reactive chemicals engineering and process scale-up and has authored many publications in this area. He received a B.S. degree in chemical engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology in 1973.
Martha A. Krebs is the Director of the Office of Science (formerly the Office of Energy Research) in the Department of Energy. At $2.7 billion, the Office is one of the largest supporters of basic research in the Federal Government ranging from materials science and engineering, chemistry, geology, engineering sciences, high energy and nuclear physics, environmental science and molecular biology. The program is responsible for unique large user facilities such as synchrotron sources, which serve thousands of university and industrial scientists from all over the country. She also has the responsibility for providing the Secretary of Energy with advice on scientific issues and on the Department’s vast system of National Laboratories.
In 1993, Dr. Krebs was appointed to this office by President Clinton and confirmed by the Senate of the United States. She came to the Office from one of the Department’s National Laboratories, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She also served as the Staff Director of a Subcommittee of the Science Committee in the House of Representatives. She received her Bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. in Physics from the Catholic University of America.
Throughout her tenure in her present position, Dr. Krebs has recognized that the knowledge required to pursue the mission of the Department of Energy and the large facilities it builds depends on researchers at universities and industries and especially the involvement of the next generation of scientists and engineers. She has visited many Universities and spoken to numerous student groups graduate, undergraduate, women and minorities. She believes that the future of a strong and diverse federal investment in science and engineering depends on effective partnerships between universities, industry and federal agencies and their laboratories. These partnerships and the value of science must be widely and clearly communicated to our sponsors and to the general public. She has worked energetically to foster these partnerships and to advocate the value of DOE’s science programs in the context of all US and international science.
Todd R. La Porte is Professor of Political Science at the Univ. of California, Berkeley (1965). Receiving his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University (1962), he has taught public administration, organization theory, administrative behavior, and technology and politics at the University of Southern California, and Stanford University as well as UCB. La Porte publishes in the areas of organization theory, technology and politics, and the organizational and decisionmaking dynamics of large, complex, technologically intensive organizations, as well as public attitudes toward advanced technologies, and the problems of governance in a technological society. He was a principle of the Berkeley High Reliability Organizations Project, a multidisplinary team that has studied the organizational aspects of safety-critical systems such as nuclear power, air traffic control, and nuclear aircraft carriers. His current research concerns the evolution of large scale organizations operating technologies demanding very high level of reliable (nearly failure-free) performance, and the relationship of large scale technical systems to political legitimacy, especially in the nuclear domain.
He was elected to the National Academy of Public Administration, 1985, and was a Fellow, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Smithsonian Institution, and Research Fellow, Wissenschaftszentrum (Sciences Center) Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for Social Research, Cologne. He has been a member of the Board on Radioactive Waste Management and panels of the Committee on Human Factors, and Transportation Research Board, National Academy of Sciences. He served on the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, Department of Energy, and chaired its Task Force on Radioactive Waste Management,
examining questions of institutional trustworthiness, and he was a member of the National Research Council's (NRC) panel on Human Factors in Air Traffic Control Automation, and the Technical Review Committee, Nuclear Materials Technology Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory.
David C. Mowery is the Milton W. Terrill Professor of Business Administration the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. He has been at Haas since 1988, after work at Carnegie Mellon, the National Research Council, and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. His professional interests are in technological change, international trade, U.S. technology policy, and the relationship between public policies and the private sector. He received a B.A. in 1974 and a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford in 1981.
Lura J. Powell is the Director of the Advanced Technology Program (ATP) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). ATP fosters economic growth in the U.S. by accelerating the development of new technology. ATP is currently leveraging more than a billion dollars in industrial R&D through projects proposed by industry, cost-shared with industry, and selected through a rigorous merit-based process.
A 23-year veteran of the NIST laboratory research programs, Dr. Powell was Chief of the Biotechnology Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology from 1991 - 1995 where she managed programs in DNA technologies, bioprocess engineering, biosensor technology and structural biology. Dr. Powell served as Chair of the Biotechnology Research Subcommittee (BRS) of the National Science and Technology Council, which coordinates all Federal biotechnology research from 1993 to 1995. She has also served as Chair of the Board of Overseers of the Center for Advanced Research in Biotechnology (a joint venture between the University of Maryland, NIST and Montgomery, Co., MD) and as Vice Chair of the ASTM Committee E-48 on Biotechnology. Her international activities included serving on the U.S. delegations to the U.S.-European Commission Task Force on Biotechnology and the OECD Working Party on Biotechnology.
Dr. Powell earned a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Maryland. She is a member of the Federal Senior Executive Service and a member of the Board of Directors of the American Chemical Society. She is the recipient of the Department of Commerce Silver Medal Award and the Outstanding Public Service Award of the Montgomery County Chapter of the International Personnel Management Association.
Christine S. Sloane is the General Motors Corporation's technical director for the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles and principal research scientist at General Motors Corporate R&D Center. In the former capacity, she is responsible for guiding and implementing the development of energy conversion and materials technologies in collaboration with the U.S. Government and the other domestic automakers to enable the design and manufacture of highly energy-efficient vehicles. Her earlier research interests included manufacturing process emissions, air quality and visibility, and aerosol physics. Dr. Sloane has authored over 80 technical papers and co-edited one book. She received her Ph.D. from MIT in chemical physics, and is the recipient of GM's John C. Campbell Award for research. She is a member of the American Association for Aerosol Research, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society for Automotive Engineers, Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi, and formerly the editorial board of Aerosol Science and Technology.
John C. Tao John C. Tao is the Director, Corporate Technology Partnerships at Air Products and Chemicals Inc. He joined Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. in 1974 in the research department of the company’s Process Systems Group. He subsequently moved into the engineering area where he assumed program responsibility for some of the company’s early energy projects. In 1980 Dr. Tao became general manager of engineering for the company’s International Coal Refining Company - a former Air Products joint venture. He subsequently was named director of planning and business development for Stearns-Catalytic World Corporation - a former engineering services subsidiary of Air Products - and in 1986 joined the Corporate Science and Technology Center. Dr. Tao was named director of research and commercial development for the advanced separations department in 1989, and was appointed director of the department in 1991. He became corporate director of environmental, health and safety assurance in 1992, and assumed his current position in December 1994. He received a B.S. degree in chemical engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology an M.S. degree in chemical engineering from the University of Delaware; and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University. He has authored close to 40 papers and holds nine U.S. patents. Dr. Tao is a member of the Commercial Development Association, Licensing Executive Society, Industrial Research Institute, Council of Chemical Research, and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. He is the current chairman of Chemical Industry Environmental Technology Projects and a board member of the Penn State Research Foundation and the chairman of the Management Committee of the Air Products/Imperial College Strategic Alliance and the Air Products/Penn State Research Alliance. He served on the advisory council for the chemical engineering department of the University of Pennsylvania, and is active in Lehigh Valley Business-Education Partnership.
William A. Wakeham has been the Pro Rector (Research) at Imperial College since October 1996, having previously spent eight years as Head of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Chemical Technology. In addition, he became Deputy Rector of the College in October 1997 and Pro Rector (Resources) in January 1999.
Professor Wakeham is interested in the relationship between the bulk thermophysical properties of fluids and the intermolecular forces between the molecules that comprise them. Thus, at one extreme, he is involved in the determination of intermolecular forces from measurements of macroscopic properties and the development and application of the statistical mechanics and kinetic theory that interrelate them. He is also actively involved in the measurement of the thermophysical properties of fluids under a very wide variety of thermodynamic states. The same thermophysical properties find application in the process industries within the design of plant. A part of Professor Wakeham’s activities are therefore concerned with the representation and extension of a body of accurate information on thermophysical properties in a fashion that allows their use with software packages for process simulation.
Professor Wakeham is the author or editor of 6 books and over 300 papers in the field of thermophysics; he is the editor of the Journal of Chemical Thermodynamics and the Chairman of Commission I.2 on Thermodynamics of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry and of its Subcommittee on Transport Properties.