Conference Canceled
Dear NSAWS attendees,
Due to the impending storm expected to reach Boston tomorrow afternoon, we have decided to cancel the symposium. We apologize greatly for this inconvenience but in light of the inclement weather, we did not want to jeopardize anyone's safety and after hearing that many speakers would be unable to attend due to travel problems caused by the storm, we thought it would be best to cancel the conference. We appreciate your interest in attending as we had amazing speakers that were very excited to share their knowledge, expertise, experience, and personal insights with you to foster the community of women pursuing careers in science. We hope to either reschedule the conference for later this year or early next year. We will notify you with any news related to this. Again we apologize for having to cancel the symposium but we hope you continue your interest in NSAWS for future events and continue connecting with other women in science.
Best regards,
Jen, Olivia, and Barr
NSAWS Co-Directors
Due to the impending storm expected to reach Boston tomorrow afternoon, we have decided to cancel the symposium. We apologize greatly for this inconvenience but in light of the inclement weather, we did not want to jeopardize anyone's safety and after hearing that many speakers would be unable to attend due to travel problems caused by the storm, we thought it would be best to cancel the conference. We appreciate your interest in attending as we had amazing speakers that were very excited to share their knowledge, expertise, experience, and personal insights with you to foster the community of women pursuing careers in science. We hope to either reschedule the conference for later this year or early next year. We will notify you with any news related to this. Again we apologize for having to cancel the symposium but we hope you continue your interest in NSAWS for future events and continue connecting with other women in science.
Best regards,
Jen, Olivia, and Barr
NSAWS Co-Directors
Speakers | Friday and Saturday Lineup!
Masha Fridkis-Hareli, PhD
AWIS Workshop
Masha Fridkis-Hareli is an immunologist, consultant and inventor with over 20 years of experience in academia and industry. During her post-doctoral training at Harvard University she designed and developed a group of novel compounds for treatment of autoimmune diseases currently in Phase II clinical trials. Dr. Fridkis-Hareli served as Principal Investigator at the Molecular Immunology Foundation at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. After transitioning to industry, she worked at a number of biotechnology and contract research companies including Resolvyx Pharmaceuticals, Charles River Laboratories, Taligen Therapeutics and Alexion Pharmaceuticals. She is currently an Adjunct Professor at the Graduate Biopharmaceutical Leadership Program at Emmanuel College and a Founder and President of ATR, LLC, a company that provides strategic and operational services in translational research.
Holly Soutter, PhD
AWIS Workshop
Dr. Soutter is Senior Research Scientist at X-Chem, Inc., a Boston area biotech company focused on early lead drug discovery. She received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from Clark University in 2000 training in protein crystallography. After post-doctorial positions at Abbott Bioresearch and the Scripps Research Institute, she joined Pfizer at their Ann Arbor site in 2006. Her involvement with AWIS has included serving on the board of AWIS San Diego, as president of the Connecticut chapter of AWIS, as a member of the mentoring and events committee of MassAWIS, and currently as chair of AWIS.
Joanne Kamens, PhD
Executive Director at Addgene
Dr. Kamens is the Executive Director of Addgene, a mission driven, non-profit dedicated to helping scientists around the world collaborate. She received her PhD in Genetics from Harvard Medical School then spent 15 years at BASF/Abbott, ultimately serving as Group Leader in Molecular Biology. In 2007 she joined the biotech RXi Pharmaceuticals as Senior Director of Research Collaborations. Dr. Kamens founded the current Boston chapter of the Association for Women in Science and helped it grow to over 300 members entirely with volunteer support. Dr. Kamens was Director of the Healthcare Business Women’s Boston Group Mentoring Program for 3 years. In 2010, Dr. Kamens received the Catalyst Award from the Science Club for Girls for longstanding dedication to empowering women in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. She has served on a number of other non-profit boards and speaks widely on career development topics in person and via Webinar.
Adriana Karaboutis
Vice President and Global CIO at Dell
Ms. Karaboutis holds a B.S. in Computer Science and an M.S. in Electronics and Computer Control Systems from Wayne State University. She is a member of the Manufacturing Executive Leadership Board and a past president of the Michigan Council of Women in Technology. Ms. Karaboutis was previously vice president of IT at Dell supporting product groups, manufacturing, procurement and supply chain operations. Prior to joining Dell in 2010, Ms. Karaboutis worked at General Motors and Ford Motor Company for a combined 21 years. At GM, she oversaw a transformational move to outsource manufacturing and supply chain IT to multiple integrators, led migrations from complex legacy systems to service-oriented architectures, and defined and enabled an innovative global model of systems. At Ford, she helped achieve significant efficiency gains through the use of Six Sigma methodologies.
Dudley Herschbach, PhD
Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science
Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University
Nobel Laureate in Chemistry
Professor Dudley Herschbach was born in San Jose, California (1932) and received his B.S. degree in Mathematics (1954) and M.S. in Chemistry (1955) at Stanford University, followed by an A.M. degree in Physics (1956) and Ph.D. in Chemical Physics (1958) at Harvard. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Royal Chemical Society of Great Britain. His awards include the Pure Chemistry Prize of the American Chemical Society (1965), the Linus Pauling Medal (1978), the Michael Polanyi Medal (1981), the Irving Langmuir Prize of the Americal Physical Society (1983), the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1986), jointly with Yuan T. Lee and John C. Polanyi, the National Medal of Science (1991), the Jaroslav Heyrovsky Medal (1992), the Sierra Nevada Distinguished Chemist Award (1993), the Kosolapoff Award of the ACS (1994), the William Walker Prize (1994); and named by Chemical Engineering News among 75 leading contributors to the chemical enterprise in the past 75 years (1998), and the Council of Scientific Society President's Award for Support of Science (1999).
Professor Herschbach is engaged in several efforts to improve K-12 science education and public understanding of science. He serves as Chair of the Board of Trustees of Science Service, which publishes Science News and conducts the Intel Science Talent Search and the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.
Professor Herschbach is engaged in several efforts to improve K-12 science education and public understanding of science. He serves as Chair of the Board of Trustees of Science Service, which publishes Science News and conducts the Intel Science Talent Search and the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.
Debbie Sterling Lewis
Founder and CEO of GoldieBlox
Ms Sterling Lewis received her engineering degree from Stanford University. Her goal was to develop a fun construction toy just for girls in order to get them interested in engineering. She believes that engineers can't build our world's future without the female perspective. Therefore, she founded a toy company with little girls in mind called GoldieBlox.
Erez Lieberman Aiden, PhD
Research Fellow at Harvard Society of Fellows & Recipient of the president’s early career award in Science and Engineering
Dr. Erez Lieberman Aiden studied mathematics, physics and philosophy at Princeton University, and earned a Master's degree in History at Yeshiva University. He completed a joint PhD in mathematics and bioengineering at the Harvard–MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. Dr. Lieberman Aiden invented a variant of chromosome conformation capture called "Hi-C" which produces a genome-wide measure of contact probabilities that point to a 3-dimensional genome structure. More he was involved in the analysis of a corpus of around 5 million digitized books, applying data mining techniques to advance the new field of culturomics. His work contributed to the Google Ngram Viewer, released in December 2010, which makes use of culturomics ideas to produce normalized historical trends for any sequence of letters.
Grace Wong Pauling, PhD
CEO ActoKine Therapeutics
Dr. Grace Wong earned a PhD The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Australia. After promotion to Scientist at Genentech, she shepherded basic research discoveries to product development with Dr. Gordon Vehar. Grace became Head of Apoptosis Research at Millennium, where she identified genes involved in drug resistance, and she joined AstraZeneca as Section Head of Molecular Genetics where she investigated gene induction by β-amyloid in Alzheimer’s disease. Grace founded ActoKine Therapeutics to discover drugs for cancer and viral diseases (www.actokine.com) and founded Student Vision (www.studentvision.org) and Nobel-Pauling (www.nobel-pauling.org) to inspire students in biotechnology.
Roberta Bondar, MD, PhD
Astronaut and Neurologist
The world's first neurologist in space and Canada’s first woman astronaut, Dr. Roberta Bondar is globally recognized for her pioneering contribution to space medicine research. For more than a decade at NASA Dr. Bondar headed an international research team, continuing to find new connections between astronauts recovering from the microgravity of space and neurological illnesses here on Earth. A true renaissance woman, Dr. Bondar is an acclaimed photographer of the environment. She co-founded The Roberta Bondar Foundation, a charitablenorganization that promotes understanding of the natural environment (www.therobertabondarfoundation.org). Dr. Bondar continues her commitment to community service and recently has become a member of the Governing Council of icipe, a pan-African institute researching the influence of climate change on the spread of diseases by insects.
Marge Livingstone, PhD
Professor of Neurobiology and Art
Margaret Livingstone is a neurobiologist at Harvard Medical School. Her work is closely linked to that of her mentor and Nobel-prize laureate, David Hubel; together, they have studied the physiological processing of visual information. Dr. Livingstone has also researched mapping techniques that helped to elucidate fundamental computations strategies in visual processing. Currently she is using functional MRI technology to study face, shape and symbolic recognition in macaque monkeys. A talented writer, she has also written a popular book for both scientists and non-specialists, Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing (Abrams, 2002) which brings the science of “seeing” to the experience of visual art.
Robert Birgeneau, PhD
Chancellor of Berkeley, Former Dean of MIT and President of University of Toronto
Robert J. Birgeneau became the ninth chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, on September 22, 2004. An internationally distinguished physicist, he is a leader in higher education and is well known for his commitment to diversity and equity in the academic community. Before coming to Berkeley, Birgeneau served four years as president of the University of Toronto. He previously was Dean of the School of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of London, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and other scholarly societies. In 2008, Birgeneau and President Nancy Kantor of Syracuse University received the 2008 Carnegie Corporation Academic Leadership Award as “Champions of Excellence and Equity in Education.”
Yael Tauman Kalai, PhD
Microsoft NERD Researcher
Yael recently joined as a researcher at Microsoft Research New England, coming from being an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Georgia Tech. Before this, she was a postdoc at the Weizmann Institute in Israel and Microsoft Research in Redmond. SHe recently graduated from MIT, working in cryptography under the superb supervision of Shafi Goldwasser. She also expresses that she was extremely fortunate to have the guidance of Adi Shamir for my master's degree.
Tamer Seckin, MD
Founder, Endometriosis Foundation of America
Ranked among America's Top Surgeons & Gynecologists, Dr. Tamer Seckin has established himself internationally as a leading specialist in the treatment of and an active educator on endometriosis. Dr. Seckin is also an active educator who continues to travel the world speaking out and teaching others about endometriosis. He has set forth consistent efforts to correct misdiagnoses and raise public awareness for a disease that, although estimated to affect the lives of 176 million women and adolescents, is commonly ignored and vastly mistreated. A passionate philanthropist, Dr. Seckin is also the Co-Founder, President & Medical Director of the Endometriosis Foundation of America (www.EndoFound.org), a top-ranked 501(c)3 charitable advocacy and research organization he co-founded with Padma Lakshmi, the international celebrity and Host of Bravo's Emmy®-award winning show, Top Chef.
Rachel Zimmerman-Brachman
Inventor of a symbol printer
Rachel Zimmerman Brachman is an education and public outreach specialist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Growing up in Canada, she participated in numerous science fairs at the school, regional, national, and international levels. As the inventor of the Blissymbol Printer, she was a member of the Women Inventors Project and the Women Inventors Networking Society. Rachel earned a bachelor's degree in Physics from Brandeis University in Massachusetts and a Master of Space Studies from the International Space University in Strasbourg, France. Rachel enjoys mentoring young women who are interested in STEM careers.
Briana Burton, PhD
Academia Panel
Dr. Briana Burton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University. She received her undergraduate degrees from Northwestern University and her Ph.D. from MIT. Dr. Burton’s work focuses on understanding how cells import nucleic acids from their environments, one of the mechanisms that allows for transfer of antibiotic resistance.
Sujata Bhatia, MD, PhD
Academia Panel
Sujata K. Bhatia, MD, PhD, PE is a physician, bioengineer, and professionally licensed chemical engineer who serves on the teaching faculty of biomedical engineering at Harvard University. She is the Assistant Director for Undergraduate Studies in Biomedical Engineering at Harvard; she is the academic advisor for all Harvard undergraduate students in bioengineering and biomedical engineering. In addition, she is an Associate of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government for the Science, Technology, and Globalization Project. Sujata has personally mentored several Harvard undergraduates to complete innovative research and design projects that advance the field of bioengineering. She has demonstrated a strong commitment not only to biomedical engineering research, but also to education, community outreach, and student life.