Lidia Brito

Director, Division of Science Policy and Sustainable Development, UNESCO

Lidia Brito holds a undergraduate degree in Forest Engineering by Eduardo Mondlane University (Mozambique) and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Forest Sciences from Colorado State University (USA). As the first Minister of Higher Education, Science and Technology of Mozambique (2000 – 2005) and Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Eduardo Mondlane University (1998-2000) she accumulated extensive experience in the fields of Higher Education, Science and Technology, ICT and innovation policies and programs. In the last year and half Lidia Brito has served as the Advisor of the Mayor of Maputo for Strategic Planning and External Relations.

She has more then twenty years working experience in the field of Forestry, Traditional energy (Biomass and charcoal), Wood Science and Technology as a University lecturer, researcher and consultant for Eduardo Mondlane University and other national and international institutions, combining academic with hands-on experience in promoting sustainable development, and community–based management and community development both in Mozambique and in Africa in general.

Extensive diverse experience working with local, national, and international organizations mainly in technical expertise and political support in good governance issues, energy, higher education, science and technology, ICT and their impact on social development.  She has served as member of many boards, such as the IHE-UNESCO Governing Board (on going), Unesco-NEPAD  High Level group; United Nations University Council (on going), of the Advisory Board of the Community Development Carbon Fund, Steering Committee for the program on Sustainable Management of Forests in Africa (on going) and Board of Directors of the Development Gateway Foundation, and recently Member of the Board of Trustees for SciDev and member of the review panel for ESSP.

Rajendra K. Pachauri

Dr. Rajendra Kumar Pachauri is the Chair of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientific inter-governmental body that provides decision-makers and the public with an objective source of information about climate change. He is also Director General of TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute), a major independent research organisation providing knowledge on energy, environment, forestry, biotechnology, and the conservation of natural resources. Dr Pachauri is a prominent researcher on environmental subjects, recognised internationally for his efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change. Since July 2009 he has also been Director, Yale Climate and Energy Institute. He is active in several international forums dealing with the subject of climate change and its policy dimensions. He was awarded the second-highest civilian award in India, the ‘Padma Vibhushan’ in January 2008 by the President of India and received the ‘Officier De La Légion D’Honneur’ from the Government of France in 2006. He has been conferred with ‘The Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star’ by His Majesty Akihito, Emperor of Japan, the ‘Commander of the Order of the White Rose of Finland’ by the Prime Minister of Finland and the ‘Commander of the Order of Leopold II’ by the King of the Belgians.

Torsten Nils Wiesel

I was born in Uppsala Sweden in 1924, the youngest of five children. My father, Fritz S. Wiesel, was chief psychiatrist and head of Beckomberga Hospital, a mental institution located on the outskirts of Stockholm. We were brought up by my mother, Anna-Lisa (b. Bentzer), at the hospital and were sent by bus to Whitlockska Samskolan, a coeducational private school in the city. I was a rather lazy, mischievous student, interested mainly in sports. My election as president of the high school’s athletic association was my only memorable achievement during that period. Suddenly, at the age of 17, I became a serious student and I did reasonably well as a medical student. My curiosity about the workings of the nervous system was stimulated by the lectures of Carl Gustaf Bernhard and Rudolf Skoglund, my professors in neurophysiology. Because of my background I was also interested in psychiatry, and I spent one year while I was a medical student working with patients in different mental hospitals.

When my studies were completed I returned to Professor Bernhards’s laboratory at the Karolinska Institute in 1954 to do basic neurophysiological research. The following year I had the good fortune to be invited to the United States as a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Stephen Kuffler’s laboratory at the Wilmer Institute, Johns Hopkins Medical School. Dr. Kuffler had just published his now classical study of the receptive field arrangements of cat retinal ganglion cells. This was an important extension of the pioneering work of Drs. Hartline and Granit, for which they received the 1967 Nobel Prize. David Hubel joined the laboratory in 1968, and the two of us decided to explore the receptive field properties of cells in the central visual pathways. This marked the beginning of our twenty year collaboration.

In 1959 Dr. Kuffler was invited to become a professor of pharmacology at Harvard Medical School, and he brought a group of young and enthusiastic investigators with him from Johns Hopkins Medical School. The effectiveness of this group of neuroscientists in research and teaching, and the foresight of Dr. Ebert, then the Dean of the Medical School, led to the formation of the Department of Neurobiology with Stephen Kuffler as the chairman. In addition to David Hubel and myself, the original group of emigres from Johns Hopkins included Edwin Furshpan and David Potter; together with Edward Kravitz we became the original faculty of the new department. David and I now had the opportunity to continue our work in a stimulating environment. Our collaboration continued until the late seventies. In the past several years I worked with Charles Gilbert, a young investigator in the Department. In 1973 I was asked to be head of the Department of Neurobiology. Dr. Kuffler, who meant so much to all of us, continued his work as a University Professor until he died suddenly in 1980. My only regret is that he could not join David and me in the celebration of the Nobel Prize.

Subra Suresh

Subra Suresh, distinguished engineer and professor, was nominated by President Barack Obama and unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in September 2010. As director of this $7-billion independent federal agency since October 2010, he leads the only government science agency charged with advancing all fields of fundamental science and engineering research and related education. NSF’s programs and initiatives keep the United States at the forefront of science and engineering, empower future generations of scientists and engineers, and foster economic growth and innovation.

Prior to assuming his current role, Suresh served as the Dean of the School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His experimental and modeling work on the mechanical properties of structural and functional materials, innovations in materials design and characterization, and discoveries of possible connections between cellular nanomechanical processes and human disease states have shaped new fields in the fertile intersections of traditional disciplines. He has co-authored more than 240 journal articles, registered 21 patents, and written three widely used materials science books. More than a hundred students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scholars have been members of his research group, and many of them now occupy prominent positions in academia, industry, and government worldwide.

Suresh received his Bachelor of Technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in First Class with Distinction; a Master’s degree from Iowa State University; and a Doctor of Science degree from MIT. Following postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he joined the faculty of engineering at Brown University in December 1983, and was promoted to full professor in July 1989. He joined MIT in 1993 as the R.P. Simmons Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and served as Head of MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering during 2000-2006.

In his leadership roles at MIT, Suresh helped create new state-of-the-art laboratories, the MIT Transportation Initiative, and the Center for Computational Engineering; led MIT’s efforts in establishing the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Center; and oversaw the recruitment of a record number of women faculty in engineering. Since joining NSF, he has established several new initiatives including INSPIRE (Integrative NSF Support Promoting Interdisciplinary Research and Education), PEER (Partnerships for Enhanced Engagement in Research, in collaboration with USAID), the NSF Career-Life Balance Initiative, and the NSF Innovation Corps.

Suresh has been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences, Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering, German National Academy of Sciences, Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, Academy of Sciences of the Developing World, Indian National Academy of Engineering, and Indian Academy of Sciences. He has been elected a fellow or honorary member of all the major materials research societies in the United States and India, and has been awarded five honorary doctorate degrees. In 2006, Technology Review magazine selected Suresh as a top-ten researcher whose research “will have a significant impact on business, medicine or culture.” His many honors include the 2006 Acta Materialia Gold Medal, the 2007 European Materials Medal, the 2008 Eringen Medal of the Society of Engineering Science, the 2011 General President’s Gold Medal from the Indian National Science Congress, the 2011 Padma Shri Award from the President of India (one of the highest civilian honors from the Republic of India), the 2011 Nadai Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the 2012 R.F. Mehl Award from the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society.

Philip Campbell

Editor-in-Chief of Nature

Education: BSc, aeronautical engineering, University of Bristol; MSc, astrophysics, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London; PhD and postdoctoral fellowship, upper atmospheric physics, University of Leicester.

Areas of responsibility include: Co-Editor of Editorials, editorial content and management of Nature, long-term quality of all Nature Publications.

Romain Murenzi

Executive Director, the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS) Romain Murenzi is the Executive Director of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS), in Trieste, Italy. Murenzi was born in Rwanda and raised in Burundi. After graduating from the National University of Burundi in 1982, he taught mathematics in high school for three years before being awarded a fellowship for doctoral studies from the Catholic University of Louvain, where he earned his Doctorate Degree in physics in 1990. Murenzi subsequently became a Postdoctorate Researcher at the Center for Research and Advanced Training in Scientific Computation in Toulouse, France, and a Professor of Physics at Clark Atlanta University in the United States. Between 2001 and 2009, he served as the Minister of Science and Technology in Rwanda. He returned to the United States in 2009 to assume a joint appointment as Director of the Center for Science, Technology, and Sustainable Development at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, DC, and Visiting Professor at the University of Maryland’s Institute of Advanced Computer Studies in College Park, Maryland. He was appointed Executive Director of TWAS in April 2011.

Murenzi’s major areas of research are multidimensional continuous wavelet transforms to quantum mechanics, and image and video processing.

Anne Glover

Professor Anne Glover was Chief Scientific Adviser for Scotland from 2006-11 and from January 2012, Anne joined the European Commission as Chief Scientific Adviser to the President. Anne holds a Personal Chair of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland and her current research focuses on the development and application of whole cell biosensors for environmental monitoring and investigating how organisms respond to stress at a cellular level.

She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Society of Biology, Royal Society of Arts and the American Academy of  Microbiology.

Anne was recognised in March 2008 as a Woman of Outstanding Achievement in the UK and was awarded a CBE for services to Environmental Science in the Queen’s New Years Honours list 2009.

Ismail Serageldin

Ismail Serageldin, Director, Library of Alexandria, also chairs the Boards of Directors for each of the BA’s affiliated research institutes and museums. He serves as Chair and Member of a number of advisory committees for academic, research, scientific and international institutions and civil society efforts which includes the Institut d’Egypte (Egyptian Academy of Science), US National Academy of Sciences (Public Welfare Medalist), the American Philosophical Society, TWAS (Academy of Sciences for the Developing World), the Indian National Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He is former Chairman, Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR, 1994-2000), Founder and former Chairman, the Global Water Partnership (GWP, 1996-2000) and the Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest (CGAP), a microfinance program (1995-2000) and was Professor of the International Chair Savoirs contre pauvreté (Knowledge Against Poverty), at Collège de France, Paris, and Distinguished Professor at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Serageldin has also served in a number of capacities at the World Bank, including as Vice President for Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development (1992-1998), and for Special Programs (1998-2000). He has published over 60 books and monographs and over 200 papers on a variety of topics including biotechnology, rural development, sustainability, and the value of science to society. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from Cairo University and Master’s degree and a PhD from Harvard University and has received 29 honorary doctorates.