Science Fellows Program Advisors
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Warren Muir, PhD Executive Director, Division on Earth and Life Studies
Prior to joining the Academies, Warren served for more than a decade as founder and president of the Hampshire Research Institute (a non-profit environmental science research organization) and Hampshire Research Associates, Inc. (an environmental science consulting firm) and as a faculty member of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. He also spent eleven years as a senior career federal official, as Director of the Office of Toxic Substances of the US Environmental Protection Agency and as Senior Staff Member for Environmental Health at the Council on Environmental Quality, Executive Office of the President. Warren has a BA, MS, and Ph.D. in Chemistry and post-graduate training in Public Health (Epidemiology). Over the past twenty years, Warren has also volunteered and has led two non-profit people-to-people organizations, HasNa, Inc. and the Children’s Friendship Project for Northern Ireland, Inc., that promote trust, understanding, friendship, and peace between divided communities outside the US – the Protestant and Catholic communities of Northern Ireland, the Turkish, Kurdish, and Arab communities of Southeastern Turkey, and the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities of Cyprus. |
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Terry Garcia Executive Vice President for Mission Programs
Prior to joining the Society in 1999, Garcia was assistant secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere, U.S. Department of Commerce, and deputy administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In this role he directed and coordinated U.S. coastal, ocean and atmospheric programs, including recovery of the endangered species, habitat conservation planning, Clean Water Act implementation, the development of the national marine sanctuary system and commercial satellite licensing. |
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George M. Whitesides, PhDWoodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor
Dr. Whitesides has held advisory positions on the National Research Council, National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and the American Philosophical Society, among other organizations. He has received dozens of honors, including the American Chemical Society (ACS) Award in Pure Chemistry (1975), the Arthur C. Cope Award (1995), the DARPA Award for Significant Technical Achievement (1996), the National Medal of Science (1998), the Von Hippel Award (2000), the Dan David Award (2005), the Welch Award (2005), and the Priestley Award (2007).
Dr. Whitesides is a co-founder of companies with a combined market capitalization of over $20 billion, including Genzyme, GelTex, Theravance, and more recent ventures Surface Logix, WMR Biomedical, and Nano-Terra, Inc. |
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Andrei E. Ruckenstein, PhDVice President and Associate Provost for Research
In addition to teaching, Dr. Ruckenstein is a former president of the Aspen Center for Physics, a prestigious National Science Foundation-funded organization; and co-founder and co-chair of the board of trustees of the Aspen Science Center, an Aspen, Colorado-based organization founded to bridge the gap between science research and education.
In 1994, he was awarded the Humboldt Foundation Senior Prize for his work in Theoretical Physics. He has also been recognized by an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship and an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award. |
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Carolyn Porco, PhDDirector, CICLOPS Cassini Imaging
She has co-authored over 80 scientific papers on subjects ranging from the spectroscopy of Uranus and Neptune, to the interstellar medium, the photometry of planetary rings, satellite/ring interactions, computer simulations of planetary rings, the thermal balance of Triton’s polar caps, heat flow in the interior of Jupiter, and a suite of results on the atmosphere, satellites, and rings of Saturn from the Cassini imaging experiment.
Porco was responsible for the epitaph and proposal to honor the late renowned planetary geologist Eugene Shoemaker by sending his cremains to the Moon aboard the Lunar Prospector spacecraft in 1998. |
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Pamela Ronald, PhDProfessor of Plant Pathology
Her work has been published in Science, Nature and other scientific periodicals and has also been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, CNN and on National Public Radio.
Ronald was a Fulbright Fellow from 1984-1985 and was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2000. She is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a 2008 Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. In 2008 she and her colleagues were recipients of the USDA 2008 National Research Initiative Discovery Award for their work on submergence tolerant rice. In 2009, they were nominated for the 2009 World Technology Award for Environment.
Ronald is co-author with her husband, Raoul Adamchak, an organic farmer, of "Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food". "Tomorrow’s Table" was selected as one of the best books of 2008 by Seed Magazine and the Library Journal. She writes an award-winning blog on food, farming and genetics. |
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Peter D. Ward, PhDProfessor of Biology and of Earth and Space Sciences
In his book Rare Earth he theorizes that complex life itself is so rare, it’s quite possible that Earth is the only planet that has any. But, he theorizes, simple life may exist elsewhere – and possibly be more common than we think.
His upcoming book, The Medea Hypothesis, makes a bold argument that even here on Earth, life has come close to being wiped out several times. Contrary to the "Gaia hypothesis" of a self-balancing, self-perpetuating circle of life, Ward’s Medea hypothesis details the scary number of times that life has come close to flatlining, whether due to comet strikes or an overabundance of bacteria.
In February 2009 Ward’s 8-hour television series, Animal Armageddon, premiered on Animal Planet Network. |
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Elizabeth Bass, MPHDirector, Center for Communicating Science
Before coming to Stony Brook, Ms. Bass held various editing positions at Newsday, the daily newspaper on Long Island, over a period of 20 years. As Newsday health and science editor in the 1990s, she supervised reporting that won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism, as well as major science writing awards. She is the co-author of two books, Bioterrorism: A Guide for Hospital Preparedness, and KidsHealth Guide for Parents: Pregnancy to Age 5, and has contributed to several other health-related books. A graduate of Cornell University, she received a Master of Public Health degree from Stony Brook University. She has taught science and health reporting at Stony Brook, and has taught as an adjunct at Hofstra University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. |
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Pam SturnerManaging Director, Leopold Leadership Program
Before moving to Stanford, Pam worked for a decade in nonprofit management and journalism. As a newspaper reporter and editor, she covered a range of environmental and resource management issues on the San Francisco Peninsula. She also led a small editorial team that won a California Newspaper Publishers Association Award for public service for reporting on education. Pam serves on the Environmental Advisory Committee to the Santa Clara Valley Water District board, where she chairs a subcommittee on product stewardship policy. |
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Richard HuttonVP of Media Production
Feature films produced or co-produced under Hutton’s direction include the forthcoming Humanitas Prize winner Where God Left His Shoes, starring John Leguizamo; the critically-acclaimed Hard Candy, starring Ellen Page; Bickford Shmeckler’s Cool Ideas; and Independent Spirit Award winner for Best Picture, Far From Heaven. Prior to Vulcan, Hutton was senior vice president of creative development at Walt Disney Imagineering. Previous to that, Hutton served as vice president and general manager of the Disney Institute, where he directed the transition of the organization from concept into an operating business. |









