NIH Director Welcomes Five New Members to the Advisory Committee to the Director
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announces the selection
of five individuals to serve as members of the Advisory Committee
to the Director (ACD). Since 1966, the ACD has advised the NIH
Director on policy and planning issues important to the NIH
mission of conducting and supporting biomedical and behavioral
research, research training, and translating research results for
the public.
"These five esteemed new members to the NIH Advisory Committee
to the Director will bring an even greater depth and range of expertise
to this dedicated team of advisors," said NIH Director Elias
A. Zerhouni, M.D.
The new members, who join 15 members of the council, are Mary
Beckerle, Ph.D., of Salt Lake City, Utah; Colleen Conway-Welch,
Ph.D., CNM, FAAN, FACNM, of Nashville, Tennessee; Walter Isaacson,
of Washington D.C.; Thomas J. Kelly, M.D., Ph.D., of New York,
New York; and Keith R. Yamamoto, Ph.D., of San Francisco, California.
Mary Beckerle, Ph.D., is executive director of Huntsman
Cancer Institute at the University of Utah. She earned her Ph.D.
in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology from the University
of Colorado at Boulder and completed post-doctoral research at
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She holds the
Ralph E. and Willia T. Main Presidential Endowed Chair in Cancer
Research and recently received the Rosenblatt Prize for Excellence,
the University of Utah's most prestigious award. She is recipient
of the 2004 American Cancer Society Sword of Hope Award and the
2001 Governor's Medal for Science and Technology, State of
Utah. In 1999, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow and a Rothschild-Mayent
Scholar of the Institute Curie. Dr. Beckerle served as president
of the American Society for Cell Biology in 2006, as a member of
the Public Affairs Advisory Committee of the Federation of American
Societies for Experimental Biology, and on scientific review panels
for the National Institutes of Health and Howard Hughes Medical
Institute. Dr. Beckerle's laboratory has discovered novel
components of the machinery that controls cell movement, a process
that is critical for normal embryonic development as well as pathological
conditions such as tumor metastasis.
Colleen Conway-Welch, Ph.D., CNM, FAAN, FACNM, has served as professor
and dean of Vanderbilt University School of Nursing since
1984. She has been active in nursing practice and education for
more than four decades. The holder of three honorary doctorates
from Cumberland University, Georgetown University, and the University
of Colorado, she is also a graduate of Georgetown University,
Catholic University of America, and New York University. She has
published extensively, served on President Reagan's Commission
on the HIV Epidemic in 1988, the National Bipartisan Commission
on the Future of Medicare in 1998, the Governor's Tennessee
Commission on the Future of TennCare, and was appointed by then-Secretary
Tommy Thompson to the Secretary's Council on Public Health
Preparedness, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Public Health
Emergency Preparedness, Department of Health & Human Services
(DHHS). She is also a member of the Medicare Coverage Advisory
Committee (MCAC) with DHHS and a member of the George Washington
University Homeland Security Policy Institute. Dr. Conway-Welch
was named by President Bush and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in
2006 as a member of the Board of Regents of the Uniformed
Services University of the Health Sciences, the premier training
program for military health care providers. She is a fellow
in the American Academy of Nursing, a charter fellow of the
American College of Nurse-Midwives, a member of the Institute of
Medicine of the National Academy of Science, and serves as a director
on the Boards of Pinnacle Bank, RehabCare Group, and Ardent Health
Services, in addition to numerous other 501(c)3 boards such as
the Health Care Leadership Council in Washington, D.C. She is also
the founding director of the Nursing Emergency Preparedness
Education Coalition (formerly the International Nursing Coalition
for Mass Casualty Education).
Walter Isaacson is president and CEO of the Aspen Institute.
He has been chairman and CEO of CNN and the managing editor
of Time Magazine. He is the author of Einstein:
His Life and Universe (April 2007), Benjamin Franklin: An American
Life (2003), and Kissinger: A Biography (1992), and coauthor of
The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986). Isaacson
is a graduate of Harvard College and of Pembroke College of Oxford
University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He began his career
at the Sunday Times of London and then the New Orleans Times-Picayune/States-Item.
He joined Time Magazine in 1978 and served as
a political correspondent, national editor and editor of new media
before becoming the magazine's 14th managing editor in 1996. He
became chairman and CEO of CNN in 2001, and then president
and CEO of the Aspen Institute in 2003. After Hurricane Katrina,
he was appointed to be the vice-chairman of the Louisiana
Recovery Authority. He is also on the Board of Directors at
United Airlines, Tulane University, the National Constitution Center,
and is chairman of the board of Teach for America.
Thomas J. Kelly, MD, Ph.D., is director of Sloan-Kettering
Institute, a research arm of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
(MSKCC) and professor at Weill Graduate School of Biomedical
Sciences, Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. (Biophysics)
from The Johns Hopkins University and his MD from The Johns Hopkins
University School of Medicine. Dr. Kelly joined MSKCC in 2002,
after a 30-year career at The Johns Hopkins University School of
Medicine, where he served as director of the Department of
Molecular Biology and Genetics and director of the Institute
for Basic Biomedical Sciences. Dr. Kelly's research focuses
on how the genome is duplicated during the eukaryotic cell cycle
with particular emphasis on the ways DNA replication is initiated
and controlled. Using animal viruses as models, Dr. Kelly's
laboratory developed the first cell-free systems for studying the
biochemistry of DNA replication in human cells. More recently,
he has focused on the links between DNA replication and the progression
of the cell cycle in human cells and in the fission yeast, Schizosacchromyces
pombe, which shares many properties with higher eukaryotes. Dr.
Kelly is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute
of Medicine and the American Philosophical Society, and fellow
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Keith Yamamoto, Ph.D., is professor of cellular
and molecular pharmacology and executive vice dean
of the School of Medicine at the University of California, San
Francisco. He has been a member of the UCSF faculty since 1976,
serving as director of the PIBS Graduate Program in Biochemistry
and Molecular Biology (1988-2003), vice chair of the
Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics (1985-1994), chair
of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology (1994-2003),
and vice dean for research, School of Medicine (2002-2003).
Dr. Yamamoto is an acknowledged leader in research focusing on
the mechanisms of signaling and gene regulation by intracellular
receptors, which mediate the actions of several classes of essential
hormones and cellular signals. He was a founding editor of Molecular
Biology of the Cell, and serves on numerous editorial boards, scientific
advisory boards, and national committees focused on public and
scientific policy, public understanding and support of biological
research, and science education. Dr. Yamamoto has long been involved
in the process of peer review and the policies that govern it at
the National Institutes of Health, serving as chairman of
the Molecular Biology Study Section (1987-1990), member of the
NIH director's Working Group on the Division of Research
Grants (1994-1995), chair of the Advisory Committee to the
NIH Center for Scientific Review (CSR) (1996-2000), member of the
NIH Director's Peer Review Oversight Group (1996-1999), and
member of the CSR Panel on Scientific Boundaries for Review (1998-2000).
Dr. Yamamoto was elected as a member of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences in 1988, the National Academy of Sciences in
1989, the Institute of Medicine in 2003, and as a fellow of the
American Association for the Advancement of Sciences in 2002.
Additional information about the ACD is available at http://www.nih.gov/about/director/acd/index.htm.
The Office of the Director, the central office at NIH, is responsible
for setting policy for NIH, which includes 27 Institutes and Centers.
This involves planning, managing, and coordinating the programs
and activities of all NIH components. The Office of the Director
also includes program offices which are responsible for stimulating
specific areas of research throughout NIH. Additional information
is available at http://www.nih.gov/icd/od/.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) — The Nation's
Medical Research Agency — includes 27 Institutes and
Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services. It is the primary federal agency for conducting
and supporting basic, clinical and translational medical research,
and it investigates the causes, treatments, and cures for both
common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and
its programs, visit www.nih.gov. |