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Science and Innovation Week
Planning Mexico City's High-Tech Future
Science and Innovation Week
Planning Mexico City's High-Tech Future
Keynote Speakers: Sam Pitroda (National Knowledge Commission of India), Alvin Toffler (Author, Future Shock), Jerry Hultin (Polytechnic Institute of NYU), Hugo Santana (IBM Mexico), Rajendra Pachauri (Energy and Resources Institute), Harry Kroto (Florida State University), Robert Richardson (Cornell University), Rajeev Sethi (Asian Heritage Foundation), Robert Engle (NYU Stern School of Business), Sherwood Rowland (UC Irvine), and Russell Read (C Change Investments)Presented by Academia Mexicana de Ciencias, Ciudad de México, Instituto de Ciencia y Tecnologia del Distrito Federal, and the New York Academy of SciencesReported by Alan Dove | Posted December 3, 2008 Overview
Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, along with the New York Academy of Sciences, the Mexican Academy of Sciences, and the Science and Technology Institute of Mexico City, convened Mexico City's "Science and Innovation Week" on September 22-25, 2008.
In six intensive sessions, Nobel laureates and other leaders in science and innovation addressed the 300-strong crowd of policymakers, business executives, teachers, and students. Morning sessions provided a sampling of scientific fields where Mexico City could excel, and the afternoons focused on innovation, the difficult alchemy of turning scientific progress into practical and profitable technologies. Specific scientific and technical fields discussed included health and genomics, urban infrastructure, and green technology. Additional sessions focused on innovation models, ways of fostering a pipeline of new talent, and how to translate scientific discoveries to marketable products.
Ebrard outlined a plan to get the area's scientific and technological infrastructure up to world-class standards. The centerpiece of his initiative is a set of four "knowledge cities" within Mexico City, each focused on a different aspect of the innovation economy: education, medicine, communication, and finance.
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Sam Pitroda, the chief architect of India's telecommunication revolution, explains how the experience of innovation in his country suggests opportunities for Mexico City's development.
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Introduction
Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard. Listen to his opening remarks. (in Spanish)
When politicians give speeches at scientific meetings, they often follow a disappointing pattern: many words of praise for the important work researchers do, some general speculation about the future, and a non-binding promise to help. Opening Mexico City's "Science and Innovation Week" on September 22, 2008, Mayor Marcelo Ebrard departed radically from this approach.
In a succinct, lucid presentation, the leader of the world's second-largest metropolis made a clear argument for the centrality of science in the city's future, then outlined a specific plan to get the area's scientific and technological infrastructure up to world-class standards. The centerpiece of Ebrard's initiative is a set of four "knowledge cities" within Mexico City, each focused on a different aspect of the innovation economy: education, medicine, communication, and finance.
Indeed, it was Ebrard, with help from the New York Academy of Sciences, the Mexican Academy of Sciences, and the Science and Technology Institute of Mexico City, who convened the weeklong meeting. The Mayor's office also commissioned an in-depth study by the RAND Corporation, a draft of which was released at the meeting, to identify Mexico City's biggest strengths and weaknesses and recommend strategies for improvement.
Rosaura Ruiz and Ellis Rubinstein represented the two scientific academies in the opening session, but the main attractions came afterward. In six intensive sessions, Nobel laureates and other leaders in science and innovation addressed the 300-strong crowd of policymakers, business executives, teachers, and students. The morning sessions provided a sampling of scientific fields where Mexico City could excel, and the afternoons focused on innovation, the difficult alchemy of turning scientific progress into practical and profitable technologies.
The science of success
The scientific portion of the meeting began with a series of presentations on health and genomics, one of the hottest fields in modern research. Scientists around the world are now sequencing whole genomes, tracking the genetic variations that contribute to chronic conditions, and manipulating the molecules of life in unprecedented new ways.
Bringing genomic and biotechnological treatments into the clinic can be difficult, though. Besides requiring risky and expensive clinical trials, new technologies such as stem cell engineering and gene therapy often raise thorny political and ethical problems. "[Biotechnology offers] enormous opportunities for improving health, but also enormous challenges for how we deal with those opportunities and how we implement them," said Oxford University's Sir Walter Bodmer, who presented an engaging overview of these issues.
Still, Mexico City is already home to world-class life sciences laboratories, whose work could form the basis for a home-grown biotechnology industry. It's a business that can take years to turn a profit, but there is little doubt that the world's demand for sophisticated new therapies will continue to grow. "As we move to a situation where hopefully the environment is better throughout the world, we will be changing enormously the demographic structure and have to take account of the diseases of older age," said Bodmer.
The second day's scientific session focused on urban infrastructure, a field that many of the world's rapidly growing megacities have ignored at their peril. From Bangalore's epic traffic jams to Beijing's dense smog, the problems of cities are rapidly becoming the problems of the entire planet.
As Rajendra Pachauri of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change explained, Mexico City, home to one quarter of Mexico's population, needs to consider its impact on the nation as a whole. Mayor Ebrard's new plan provides an opportunity to do just that. "While this excellent initiative ... would certainly serve the interests of Mexico City, one has to take a much larger view and see how such a development and such a vision might actually help all of Mexican society," said Pachauri.
The bulk of Pachauri's presentation focused on the urgent need for cities to adapt to the realities of global climate change and disparate access to technology. "I would say it's a terrible tragedy that in the 21st century we have 1.6 billion people who've never used ... electricity," said Pachauri. He advocates turning on the lights in those dark homes with sustainable technologies, such as solar-charged lanterns.
Pachauri's electrification plan highlights one of the advantages developing countries have in the 21st century. In areas that missed the industrial revolution, a complete absence of infrastructure offers a level playing field for new technologies. For example, rather than waiting for electrical grids and telephone lines to reach them, many of the world's rural poor have skipped directly to using solar panels and cellular telephones.
The ability to leapfrog from pre-industrial to post-industrial technology also puts places like Mexico City in a good position to improve their environmental footprint, which was the subject of the third day's scientific session on "green science." Speakers in this session discussed a wide array of developments, ranging from decentralized electrical generation systems to creative new solar power technologies.
Getting individuals, cities, and nations to adopt any of these innovations, though, will require economic incentives. As New York University's Robert Engle explained, the economic incentives provide the world's best hope for a solution to climate change. Engle urged governments to levy a tax on carbon-emitting fuels, so that their market price reflects their actual environmental cost.
As recent data prove, such fuel price increases would be powerful incentives for conservation. "In the U.S. it's become patriotic to save energy, but $4/gallon [gasoline] has been far more effective than any patriotism in getting people to change their behavior," said Engle.
From bench to business
After each day's scientific discussion, attendees turned their attention to the more loosely defined process of innovation, a term that encompasses the numerous steps needed to turn laboratory results into useful products. It's a subject that has recently found increasing interest among policy makers.
Scientists have long regarded product development as a form of selling out, but the rise of global competition and the fall of old business models has suddenly turned innovation into a basic survival skill. That transformation became even clearer right before the meeting began, as a historic stock market crash spurred the U.S. government to implement a massive economic bailout plan. "The world got a lot flatter last week—about $700 billion flatter," said Jerry Hultin of Polytechnic University, who opened the session on innovation models. Hultin added that with the world's financial markets suddenly deleting trillions of dollars from the global economy, "[we] are all going to be innovators and entrepreneurs for the next decade or more."
Hultin and most of the other speakers at the meeting converged on a model of innovation that places universities at the center. In this approach, faculty and students often spin their discoveries into products and companies themselves, turning the school into a source of both new knowledge and new economic development.
Participants at Science and Innovation Week, Mexico City
Front row: Robert C. Richardson, Sam Pitroda, Sherwood Rowland, Alvin Toffler, Marcelo Ebrard, Rajendra Pachauri, Rosaura Ruíz.
Middle row: Rajeev Sethi, Maria Esther Orozco.
Back row: Jerry Hultin, Arturo Fernandez, Jose E. Villa Rivera, Juan Carlos Romero Hick, Jaime Matuscelli, Arturo Molina, Axel Didriksson, Fernando Brambila.
Of course, some researchers are already pursuing this approach, by asking how their own work might help solve difficult real-world problems. Harry Kroto and his colleagues at Florida State University, for example, have recently been modifying their laboratory's famous nanotubes to make a variety of practical tools. "We should be able to take this technology and print onto the surface of plastic sheets, solar cells, and you name it, and then these [printing presses] can actually do something useful," said Kroto. He added, "That's what science and technology should be about, humanitarian contributions."
Journalists might contend that printing presses already do something useful, but Kroto begs to differ. Speaking during the second innovation session, which focused on educating the future scientific workforce, he cited the corrosive effect of tabloid journalism. Particularly in the United States, antiscientific claims are a regular feature of popular news and entertainment. "If we want young people who are smart and clever to solve these problems, we certainly have to change some of the stuff that's out there in the media," said Kroto.
Other speakers in the session presented a variety of solutions for the current problems in science education. For Mexico City, programs such as Internet-based distance learning and public outreach by scientists could help address a range of difficulties, including underfunded schools and a shortage of scientific role models.
Many of those problems are not unique to Mexico. Sam Pitroda, the chief architect of India's telecommunication revolution, highlighted the multifaceted difficulties science's promoters face. "At times, we have 21st-century technologies, 20th-century organizations, and 19th-century mindsets," said Pitroda. Upgrading organizations and mindsets, though, is neither quick nor easy.
Mexico City could become a proving ground for 21st-century infrastructure.
For example, a casual observer might think that India's recent development occurred suddenly, with an Internet-fueled launch into the global services industry driving a meteoric rise from third-world backwater to global competitor. In fact, said Pitroda, the history of the country's modernization goes back half a century. After wresting independence from Britain in 1947, one of the first tasks of the nation's new political leadership was a massive effort to educate the largely illiterate population. "It took almost 40 years before we could see some results," he explained.
The final session of the meeting covered the mechanisms that actually work in getting technology to the marketplace, and the areas where innovation is needed most. Interestingly, one of the most fertile areas for new technology is also one where Mexico City could excel: construction. With a population growing past 20 million in the greater Mexico City area, the demand for new housing and offices is enormous.
However, the building trades have long been a technological backwater. "The construction industry is the only industry ... that has experienced a decrease in productivity over the last 30 years," said Russell Read of the University of California at Davis, who kicked off the session. Read adds that "when you look at the construction industry, you're lucky if you get a better nail gun."
By investing in newer construction and design technologies, Mexico City could become a proving ground for 21st-century infrastructure. Nor do these investments need to be considered charity; Read argued persuasively that investments in sustainable building and energy technologies are poised to pay huge dividends in the future.
Whatever fields the city chooses to specialize in, local scientists and business leaders are clearly off to a good start. Collectively, the speakers at the conference presented persuasive support for a prediction Sam Pitroda made in his keynote address: "Mexico City can do it and will do it. Mexico City will become the knowledge capital of Latin America."
Health & Genomics
Highlights
- Cities worldwide are now trying to reconfigure their economies around science and technology.
- Mexico City is positioning itself to become the "knowledge capital" of Latin America.
- Mexico City's young scientists are poised to produce breakthroughs in biotechnology, if the country can keep them from leaving.
- Life sciences are one of Mexico's particular strengths, and could form the basis for a home-grown biotechnology industry.
- As new medical technologies become available, providing equal access to healthcare will become more important, but also more expensive.
The thinking cure
By hosting its first Science and Innovation Week in September, 2008, Mexico City officially declared its intent to become a global hub of science and technology. It is certainly not the first major urban center to try this, nor is it likely to be the last. Indeed, the Academy and other organizations have recently convened very similar meetings in major urban centers around the world. From Shanghai to New York, the speakers at these meetings change, but the general theme remains the same: city leaders want to bring in more science.
Cities suddenly see science as the key to their future.
It's a remarkable shift. Cities, traditionally structured around industry and commerce, have long regarded science as little more than a novelty. Now they suddenly see it as an essential component of their future survival. What's changed?
In a word, everything. With the global population exploding past six billion, environmental problems mounting, technological revolutions erasing traditional borders, and the wheels falling off the world's financial markets, nearly everyone is starting to wonder what comes next. It might not be pretty.
Author Alvin Toffler, one of the meeting's keynote speakers, pointed to skyrocketing oil prices and shaky banks as symptoms of a more significant phenomenon. "These are only superficial elements of a much, much bigger picture," he said, adding that "dramatic changes will be needed to bring huge populations out of misery and to fuel the third wave societies of the world of tomorrow."
Those "third wave" societies, which Toffler and his wife Heidi first predicted more than two decades ago, are the knowledge centers that turn science and technology into jobs and revenues—the formula that the world's major cities are now rushing to implement. To help Mexico City along that path, the meeting featured three half-day science sessions surveying the major fields in which the city could focus its efforts.
The destiny of biology
Sir Walter Bodmer of the University of Oxford, whose pioneering work has advanced both human genetics and the public's understanding of science, kicked off the series of presentations on health and genomics. Bodmer led the audience on a brisk but lucid tour of the current state of genomic technology.
As the cost of sequencing a person's complete genome plummets, doctors may soon be ordering complex genetic tests as easily as they now order a blood count. But while technology marches inexorably toward this future, doctors and patients need to prepare for it. "[This] involves not only having a medical profession that understands the nature of [genetic] differences, but also a public that can accept the knowledge that comes from this and understands what the benefits might be," said Bodmer.
Public education is critical for biotechnology.
For example, researchers have already found several genes that predict patients' responses to particular drugs. Knowing who will respond well to a treatment and who will suffer side effects is certainly useful, but it also raises some new problems. "It's not a concept that the pharmaceutical companies are particularly keen on," said Bodmer, adding that "you would like to have a drug that works in everybody ... and not have to test whether someone is going to respond, but I think the future will be more and more in identifying those individuals who respond most effectively to a particular drug."
Bodmer also worries that the press of new genomic technologies could distract attention from more basic needs, especially in developing countries. Developing new genomic tests is important, but so are fundamental public health projects such as water treatment plants and smoking cessation programs.
Fighting the resistance
As Cinvestav's Maria Esther Orozco pointed out, though, researchers in Mexico are well placed to do both things, advancing biomedical technology while simultaneously helping to solve ancient public health problems. The key, she said, is in understanding where our diseases come from.
Among many other discoveries, modern genetics has provided unprecedented insight into human origins, identifying five major migrations of our African ancestors as our species populated the planet. During these migrations, our tribes' genes and resident microbes adapted to new environments. The result is a world of diverse human races, with differences in their susceptibilities to diseases.
Genetics has also revealed how emerging and re-emerging pathogens evolve, often making substantial changes in their genomes in order to evade immune defenses and new medications. Researchers, in turn, are trying to use this knowledge to develop second and third-line therapies to kill the resistant pathogens. Mexico City presents a unique front in this arms race, as its world-class scientists live and work in a city with a substantial infectious disease burden. Orozco argued that the city could lead the way in developing new antimicrobial agents.
Whatever research the city chooses to promote, it will need to remain flexible in the future. Concluding a presentation about cutting-edge biomedical technologies, Thomas Caskey of the Brown Foundation contended that the real revolution is yet to come: "While we have incredibly advanced technology in 2008, there are going to be technologies that eclipse what we're dealing with. Therefore we must constantly be on the move and be adaptive."
Plugging the brain drain
But as Mexicans know from long experience, a rising tide of technology does not lift everyone equally. "We are facing a worldwide [scientific] revolution," said Rafael Palacios, adding that "the question is ... will we be able to be some of the actors promoting this revolution, or as usually happens will we have just secondhand knowledge and secondhand derivatives of this type of revolution?"
According to Palacios, education is the key to making Mexico City a leader in innovation rather than a follower. In particular, the city needs to train more and better scientists, and then provide them with opportunities to use their knowledge for Mexico's benefit, rather than using it merely as a ticket out of the country. At the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Palacios has put that thinking into practice, creating an integrated undergraduate program in math, computer science, and biology to prepare the next generation of genomic researchers.
Future scientists will need incentives to stay in the country.
The effort appears to be off to an excellent start. Internationally renowned researchers who have visited the UNAM campus to meet the program's third-year students have raved about the group's intelligence, understanding of advanced genomics concepts, and potential for success. "The tone of these opinions ... is not at all a patronizing type of opinion, it's really something that comes from a colleague who sees these kids as colleagues, as equals to any others in the world," said Palacios.
To drive that point home, one of the advanced students from the program spoke next, delivering an insightful and articulate description of the promise and needs of these young scientists. "Even though many of us will prefer to complete our graduate studies abroad, we want to come back to Mexico afterwards," she said. But she warned that "when we come back, we need access to infrastructure and finance, as well as job positions, so that new and fresh minds can start developing new projects for this country."
Redistributing the future
Whether the next generation of biomedical breakthroughs come from Mexican or international scientists, they will be of little use if policymakers cannot make universal healthcare work. Indeed, in developing countries, even relatively successful ones such as Mexico, past technological advances have been applied very unevenly. The result is what experts like Julio Frenk, Mexico's former secretary of health, describe as "maldevelopment."
"In maldeveloped societies, old and new problems coexist in a complex present fraught with contradictions and inequalities," said Frenk. For example, fast food and television have reached many more poor communities worldwide than window screens and modern plumbing. As a result, maldeveloped countries are now experiencing a dual disease burden: obesity and diabetes live alongside malaria and cholera.
Rather than see this trend as cause for despair, Frenk sees it as an enormous opportunity. Having helped Mexico provide universal health insurance for its citizens, he argued that pursuing a similar goal globally could have enormous benefits. "In our turbulent world, health remains one of the few truly universal aspirations. It therefore offers a concrete opportunity to reconcile national self interest with international mutual interest," said Frenk.
Urban Infrastructure
Highlights
- Globally, resource shortages, aging populations, and climate change are creating a huge need for new technologies.
- As more of the world's population moves to cities, cities need to reduce their impact on the planet.
- Mexico City could develop sustainable innovations in biotechnology, medicine, and urban infrastructure.
- Improved building designs could slash cities' energy use while making them more livable.
- Urban farms built into high-rise buildings could reduce Mexico City's agricultural footprint dramatically.
- Current urban power supply systems are appallingly wasteful; decentralized electrical generation might help cities cope with skyrocketing demand.
Can we build it?
Besides thinking globally, solving the problems of the future will also require acting locally, especially in the developing world's rapidly growing megacities. In these metropolises, high-rise office buildings abut sprawling slums, while vast gridlocks of vehicles fill the streets. Fixing the numerous defects in such cities will be a bit like rebuilding an aircraft engine in flight, but speakers in the conference's urban infrastructure section seemed ready to pick up their wrenches.
Rajendra Pachauri, who was a leader of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, began the session with an eloquent overview of global climate change, a well-documented phenomenon that some policymakers still make strenuous efforts to discount. "There is really no scientific basis for doubting the process of climate change, which is on and which has been on for quite a few decades," said Pachauri, adding that "we really should set that controversy to rest."
 Nor is there any mystery about the major driver of the process, which is the enormous and growing quantity of "greenhouse gases," such as carbon dioxide, that humanity is pouring into the atmosphere to power the global economy. Reducing that form of pollution will be extremely costly and difficult, but continuing to ignore the problem will be even worse. Based on current fossil fuel consumption rates, Pachauri and his colleagues on the IPCC project an average global surface temperature increase of anywhere from 1.8° C to 4°C by the end of the 21st century.
Those figures may sound moderate, but their effects, ranging from rising seas and flooding to crop failures and droughts, would not be. "The human race cannot possibly witness the impacts of climate change that would be implied in this rate of temperature change," said Pachauri.
Averting and mitigating these problems doesn't have to be painful. With urban centers generating 80% of global carbon dioxide emissions, new infrastructure projects could go a long way toward reducing humanity's carbon footprint while improving city dwellers' quality of life.
Getting around and staying put
Transportation and buildings consume the overwhelming majority of cities' energy, so redesigning these two things is a high priority for urban science. Often, though, well-meaning designers have focused their talents on lucrative new construction in green fields, while ignoring the more complicated problems of renovating established cities.
Brandon Haw and his colleagues at architectural firm Foster + Partners are trying to reverse this trend. In one example, Haw described a commission the company received to redesign the formerly industrial inner harbor of Duisburg, Germany, remaking the area into a shopping and entertainment destination. The team incorporated numerous features to conserve and produce energy in the new buildings, turning an environmental disaster zone into an attractive landscape that actually generates surplus electricity. "This is essential for our cities, to take the brownfield sites and see how to transform them into good places to be," said Haw.
Breakthroughs in logistics can revolutionize global commerce.
While energy-efficient buildings may become landmarks of the future cityscape, more efficient transportation systems will likely be less glamorous. In a summary of the essential science of logistics, Martin Wachs of the University of California, Berkeley, highlighted both the field's stunning progress and its inexcusably low status on public agendas. "We're putting far more energy into improving, say, television sets and video games than we are into improving the infrastructure that makes our cities work," said Wachs.
Despite this minimal research investment, breakthroughs in logistics have revolutionized global commerce. Containerized freight improved the efficiency of shipping dramatically, making globalized manufacturing possible, and improved railroad and highway networks bring greater prosperity while decreasing energy use. Looking ahead, Wachs argued that improvements in Mexico City's logistics infrastructure could simultaneously boost the area's economy and reduce its environmental impact.
Up on the farm
Dickson Despommier of Vertical Farm Technologies turned the focus to the humanity's largest environmental footprint, at least in surface area: agriculture. Eighty percent of the Earth's arable land is already being farmed, often inefficiently. To reach the growing populations in cities, the food from these poorly managed farms must travel long distances, causing even more environmental damage. Cities can't grow their own food locally, of course, because they don't have enough space. Or do they?
Citing New York City as an example, Despommier explained that even where real estate prices are high and development is dense, a surprising amount of land remains unused. Tallying the city's collection of abandoned buildings, former industrial sites, and unused government properties, Despommier and his students have found substantial acreage going to waste. "If you look around carefully enough, you can find lots of real estate that would be amenable to an alternate use," he said.
Rather than plow that land for inefficient 20th-century agriculture, Despommier proposes building high-rise greenhouses, maximizing growing efficiency year-round. Several architects have already begun sketching these vertical farms, including one building, about the size of a typical office structure, that could feed an estimated 35,000 people.
Power to the people
Besides producing food closer to home, cities of the future should also consider producing electricity nearby, according to David Sweet, executive director of the World Alliance for Decentralized Energy. He argued that the current model for power generation, using a small number of massive power plants to energize an entire national grid, is too inefficient to remain viable.
Conventional power plants are appallingly wasteful
Standard power plant technology, which has remained largely unchanged for 50 years, is appallingly wasteful. A typical coal- or oil-powered generating plant recovers only about one third of the energy in the fuel, releasing the remainder as waste heat. Expensively maintained power lines then carry the electricity to distant cities, wasting more to resistance in the wires.
Sweet and his colleagues propose slashing those losses by building much smaller, more efficient generators much closer to where the power is being used. "When you deploy more decentralized power within a region ... you reduce CO2 emissions by up to 70% and delivered power costs by up to 40%," he said. The numbers are not conjectural; in recent years, nations as diverse as Azerbaijan and Denmark have reaped enormous benefits from decentralizing their power grids. In the near future, homeowners could even take the process a step further, using tiny, high-efficiency generators to produce both heat and electricity for individual houses.
Green TechnologyHighlights
- Putting a price on climate-changing carbon emissions will help drive innovation in several fields.
- New technologies could help cities minimize their environmental footprints while developing their economies.
- Past environmental regulations have worked well, suggesting that an aggressive carbon policy could go far in combating climate change.
- Energy conservation represents a huge source of "found fuel" that remains to be fully tapped.
The other green
There is little doubt that energy will be a central concern for every society in the 21st century. As fossil fuel supplies shrink and environmental damage from burning them mounts, researchers are redoubling efforts to develop alternative power sources. Appropriately, energy was a major focus of the meeting's green science and technology section, but with an interesting twist. Rather than discuss exotic new ways of producing energy, most of the section's speakers focused on the real barrier to implementing green technologies: money.
Economics often gets short shrift in scientific discussions, but as Nobel laureate economist Robert Engle explained in a stimulating keynote presentation, the science is critical for addressing the world's current energy problems. In particular, economists have spent decades figuring out how to measure and price risk. Applying their tools to the risk of energy-related disasters yields some surprising insights.
As an example, Engle pointed to the stocks of auto makers Honda and Ford, which in 2000 had nearly identical prices. "So investors in 2000 looking forward were valuing these two investments at approximately the same level," said Engle, "but we of course know that they chose very different strategies: Honda produced small, fuel-efficient cars using nonunion labor, Ford produced large SUVs using union labor." The two companies had bet their businesses on radically different views of the future abundance of oil and the future price of labor.
Economists can put prices on energy-related risks.
In 2008, it's obvious that Honda was right and Ford was wrong, and the two stock prices have diverged appropriately. "The bet that the Ford management made turned out to be disastrous," said Engle. The lesson for other companies is that managers need to think about long-term trends, especially in energy, in order to survive. "It might be that the stock market will not respond to this right away, but if you're well positioned, you will be the winner," said Engle.
Policymakers also need to take a longer view, but that tends to be at odds with their need to be re-elected every few years. Still, Engle argued that even a very long-term problem, such as global climate change, could be approached in a politically palatable way. For example, imposing a hefty tax on carbon-based fuels would certainly cut consumption and emissions, but it would be politically unpopular. To address that, Engle proposed taking the enormous revenue from a carbon tax and redistributing most of it equally to the taxpayers at the end of each year. People who conserve energy would make money, those who waste energy would come out behind, and few voters would object to getting an annual payment in any case.
Cutting carbs
It's unclear whether any nation will implement a plan such as Engle's, but as atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Sherwood Rowland of the University of California, Irvine explained in his keynote address, some type of intervention is clearly necessary. Fortunately, the track record of emissions policies is actually quite good. The field's most dramatic success to date, the 1987 Montreal Protocol, has reduced global emissions of ozone-depleting chemicals dramatically, saving an entire layer of the planet's atmosphere from likely extinction. That success and others bode well for aggressive climate change policies, Rowland argued.
Some of those policies will undoubtedly be costly, but others may actually yield a profit. In a thorough discussion of the potential for energy conservation, the International Energy Agency's Paul Waide explained that reducing a nation's carbon footprint need not come at the expense of its economy. Many nations are already reaping these benefits.
In the world's 11 largest economies, energy use grew steadily over the past 30 years, but energy services—the amount of profitable work the energy actually does—skyrocketed. "[Improved] energy efficiency is actually the largest contributor to energy services," said Waide, adding that these economies are emitting 5.5 billion tons less CO2 today than they would without the past few decades' efficiency improvements.
Pessimists might assume that the low-hanging fruit have already been picked, and that future efficiency gains will be much harder. The data say otherwise. Plotting energy use as a function of per capita gross domestic product, Waide showed that nations differ substantially in their energy efficiency. Bringing U.S. industry up to Japanese energy efficiency standards, for example, would reduce global carbon emissions enormously, without requiring radical new technologies. Energy consumers simply need the motivation to improve.
In the past few years, they've started to get it. "There's almost like a perfect storm of rising energy prices, growing concerns about environmental impacts of traditional energy, and energy security concerns, which are helping move ... significant sums of finance into clean energy sectors," said Waide. Besides prompting consumers and industry to adopt existing energy-conserving technologies, this trend has also fed a burgeoning green power industry, and alternative energy sources such as wind turbines and photovoltaic cells are providing a rapidly increasing percentage of the world's energy.
Ra, Ra for the sun gods
Mexico City, with its high-altitude location in the tropics, is particularly well placed to take advantage of solar energy. As Juan Luis Peña of Cinvestav pointed out in the introduction to his talk, it wouldn't be the first time the citizens of this ancient metropolis looked to the sun for solutions; Mayan ruins throughout the area highlight the centrality of our nearest star in traditional Mexican beliefs.
For Peña, sun worship consists of building improved photovoltaic devices to harvest solar energy. With the latest generation of this technology, made from thin films of cadmium-based compounds, he estimates that Mexico City could soon produce a substantial portion of its electrical power from rooftop solar panels, placing the city at the forefront of an environmental revolution.
Oguz Capan of ROC Enerji also cited ancient sun worshipers as an inspiration, in his case the Hittites who inhabited his native Turkey in Biblical times. Capan, a former oil industry consultant, initially investigated several alternative energy technologies to try to find one that he could improve, and solar power immediately interested him. "Photovoltaic cells are very interesting, very exciting, but then I decided that it was way beyond my capacity," said Capan.
Instead, he chose to study a technology that even the Hittites would have understood: solar thermal power. Rather than use exotic chemicals to turn photons into electrical energy, solar thermal systems concentrate the sun's rays to heat a fluid, then use the hot fluid to warm buildings directly or drive conventional steam power plants.
It's a simple idea that's been surprisingly tough to reduce to practice. Current systems, including a large facility now providing power in the California desert, require expensive curved mirrors and leaky movable pipes. Capan took a much more direct approach, sticking cheap flat mirrors onto a parabolic surface and keeping the fluid pipes fixed, eliminating numerous problematic moving parts. The system may look slightly less elegant than the one in California, but it has enormous advantages in cost and simplicity. A pilot plant is already producing steam in Turkey, and Capan's company is now preparing to sell similar systems worldwide. "We are going to be ready for mass production and marketing of these units by the end of this year," he said.
Capan, and most of the meeting's other scientific speakers, also got considerable attention from attendees in hallway discussions and post-seminar receptions. The academic and business elites of Mexico City clearly understood what was at stake—if they don't take advantage of the new wave of 21st century scientific breakthroughs quickly enough, someone else surely will.
Innovation Models
Highlights
- The traditional U.S. model of innovation, driven by consumption and defense, is no longer appropriate.
- In the newly emerging model of innovation, universities take the lead to produce products with social benefits.
- Convincing faculty members to become entrepreneurs is difficult, but essential, for promoting a local knowledge economy.
- Appropriately designed clusters of schools and small companies provide fertile ground for innovation.
- Policymakers need to ensure that regulations are clear and don't unnecessarily hinder new technology ventures.
Settling the endless frontier
As World War II broke out, a flinty New Englander named Vannevar Bush managed to get an audience with U.S. President Roosevelt. Bush wanted to discuss a topic that had been bothering him for years: the difficulty of translating basic research findings into practical technologies. With the German blitzkrieg pounding America's European allies, and U-boats cruising off the coast of New Jersey, the nation clearly needed more innovations, and needed them immediately.
In ten minutes, Bush convinced Roosevelt to create a new government office in charge of scientific innovation for the upcoming war effort, and to let Bush run it. Over the next few years, this seemingly impulsive American project brought many revolutionary new products to the world, including radar, nuclear weapons, and DDT. Coordinating American basic research with need-driven innovation also fed the construction of a vast "military-industrial-academic complex" that continues to drive the nation's research and development efforts today.
The U.S. model of innovation has worked, but is it sustainable?
Even the most strident critics of this approach concede that some of its postwar products, such as mass-produced penicillin, the Internet, and satellite navigation, have provided enormous benefits. It's an innovation model that obviously works. But is it sustainable?
Sam Pitroda, the chief architect of India's telecommunication revolution, thinks not. "We still continue to follow the U.S. business model, which is high cost, based on high consumption rates—some of these models are not scalable," said Pitroda, a keynote speaker at the conference and chair of India's National Knowledge Commission. Rather than focus on defense and consumption, Pitroda argues that the developing world should concentrate on meeting the needs of the poor, who comprise an enormous but largely untapped market.
To do that, most of the speakers in the meeting's afternoon "innovation" sessions advocate a decentralized system, led by universities rather than governments. Examples of this system are easy to find, ranging from Boston's famous biotechnology corridor to the cluster of plastics companies built around a polymer science program in Akron, Ohio.
Under the right conditions, universities can act like seed crystals in a saturated solution, nucleating entrepreneurial communities that bring the school's science to the marketplace. For Mexico City, already home to world-class university research, the question is how to saturate the surrounding solution.
Venture scholarship
In order to get to its destination, the city first has to figure out where it is now. Accordingly, Mayor Ebrard commissioned an in-depth study of Mexico City's current knowledge economy to identify the area's strengths and weaknesses. This study, prepared by the RAND Corporation over the past nine months, was a centerpiece of the conference.
Summarizing the study's findings, Steven Popper ran through a long list of advantages the city enjoys. Comparing Mexico City to several other successful metropolises, Popper and his colleagues on the RAND team found a robust academic research infrastructure, including truly world-class life sciences laboratories. The area also enjoys a strong economy with a large number of skilled jobs. "So if there are all these assets, what is the problem?" asked Popper.
There are quite a few. A long legacy of state-directed economies, uneven education, strains on physical infrastructure and security, and a lack of government coordination have kept the world's second-largest city from realizing its potential. Popper and his colleagues suggest raising education standards, streamlining regulations, and fostering more collaboration between companies and universities. It's not a guaranteed formula for success, but the status quo virtually guarantees stagnation. "There will be many failures, but the time to start [changing] is now," said Popper.
The knowledge economy is risky, but rewarding.
Why choose a course that will produce many failures? As Jerry Hultin explained, that's how the knowledge economy works. Because innovation relies on the risky fields of science and entrepreneurship, many innovative businesses will fail for every one that succeeds. The key, Hultin said, is to develop a new model of innovation that encourages academic researchers to take their findings directly to the market, even at the risk of failure.
"The mark of a great university in the 21st century is that it takes the next step, it moves ... research into connection with society, it creates companies, products, services, jobs, and the power that changes society," said Hultin. But telling researchers to move from the world of grants and tenure to the world of venture capital and product launches is a tough sell. "That, incidentally, will create a revolt in your faculty," said Hultin, who added that many researchers still regard business ventures as a form of "selling out."
It's the network
As Alan Paau of the University of California, San Diego argued, though, these academic traditionalists are drawing an artificial boundary. "Innovation is really a creative use of your knowledge, most often in commerce," said Paau. If it's okay to use your knowledge to publish papers, it should be just as acceptable to use it to launch companies.
Academic entrepreneurs will drive future industry.
Besides overcoming academic cultural taboos, researchers seeking to commercialize their results need to find and hire the right staff. Industry clusters and "open business" strategies can speed that process considerably. "When you get into the modern day technology industry clusters, you don't need to have all the elements from manufacturing to marketing ... everything can be outsourced," said Paau.
Even in a connected, outsourced world, there are tremendous benefits from having clusters of similar businesses and related academic research in close proximity. Chance encounters at a local restaurant, the ability to meet colleagues face-to-face, and the general tendency of good ideas to breed other good ideas often makes such clusters extremely successful. But behind the well-known successes of this model, such as the biotechnology corridors around Boston and San Francisco, stand many unnecessarily expensive failures.
Making an innovation cluster work requires focus. "There are more than 210 biotechnology clusters being built by governments," said Mike Standing of the Monitor Group, but he added that "the reality is that not every one of those clusters is going to be successful. We're seeing at the moment literally billions of dollars being wasted in people attempting to build clusters that are inappropriate, that are not going to create distinctive capabilities either at a regional level or a global level."
After reviewing the strategies of successful research clusters around the world, Standing pointed to two areas where Mexico City could specialize: developing new systems for healthcare delivery and inventing technologies to improve urban infrastructure. The latter field is particularly intriguing, as Mexico City is now facing many of the problems that other global megacities will soon need to tackle. "Here in Mexico City ... is a potential place where you could experiment in building what the next generation of cities looks like," said Standing.
Testing new recipes for success
Regardless of how a city chooses to specialize, successful innovation generally requires a combination of local, regional, and national policies that help—or at least don't hinder—scientific research and entrepreneurial risk-taking. Even in nations with long histories of technological success, policymakers are now trying to adjust to a new way of doing business.
Sylvia Schwaag-Serger of the International Organisation for Knowledge Economy and Enterprise Development discussed Sweden's experience with this transition. Despite being home to the Nobel Prize and a longtime center of European science and industry, the nation faces some problems in its research infrastructure. For example, much of Sweden's scientific workforce is transient. "We educate more Chinese students than the U.S., but they don't show up in business or academia, and that's because we send them home," said Schwaag-Serger.
Through a new government agency, called Vinnova, Sweden is now trying to ensure that its scientific investments continue to pay dividends to Swedish taxpayers. With researchers increasingly enmeshed in global collaborations, Serger said that goal is "creating new policy challenges, and I don't think any country has found the answers yet."
Even technologically successful nations need to adapt to the new economy.
Hugo Santana echoed that sentiment in his talk, which focused on an in-depth study of innovation commissioned by his company, computer giant IBM. After interviewing hundreds of business leaders across five continents, IBM concluded that the new knowledge economy is already in operation, and that competing in it will require a new approach to product development.
Vannevar Bush's original strategy, with science flowing linearly from academia to big industry, was tremendously successful in the 20th century, but it is clearly showing its age. Most of the meeting's speakers agreed that in the 21st century, a much more diverse, networked model of innovation will prevail, blurring or eliminating the lines between academic, industrial, and government research and development.
Even in the United States, which has dominated technological innovation for decades, policymakers are scrambling to renovate the research infrastructure. The New York Academy of Sciences' Karin Pavese presented a lucid summary of the recently passed America COMPETES Act, which implements a barrage of changes for the nation's scientific funding agencies, technology businesses, and educational systems, all aimed at increasing innovation. Among other things, the law doubles funding for research in the physical sciences, invests in entrepreneurship, adjusts standards in intellectual property, and supports a retooling of America’s manufacturing capacity to face 21st-century challenges.
Pipeline of Talent
Highlights
- Science and innovation are inherently global processes, bringing people from multiple nations together.
- Improved education and public outreach are critical for cities that want to succeed in the knowledge economy.
- Internet-based classrooms can help overcome the chronic underfunding and geographical barriers that plague Latin American school systems.
- Environmental challenges are inspiring a new generation of students to enter science and engineering.
It takes a village
Developed and developing countries alike are clearly keen to promote innovation, and the array of policy changes and investments they're now applying to accomplish that is certainly encouraging. But in order for a nation, a city, or a company to develop tomorrow's technologies, they'll need more scientists and engineers. Where will those people come from?
To succeed, cities need to attract more scientists and engineers.
Everywhere. Speaking during the meeting's session on the "pipeline of talent," Nobel laureate chemist Harry Kroto presented a picture of his laboratory group, with each person labeled by nationality. The result resembles a United Nations gathering. "This group of people is international, they don't know any boundaries," said Kroto, adding that "science is international—we speak a language which is the same, doesn't matter what you believe, what country you're in."
Depending on your perspective, that's either good or bad news. Unlike the industrial economy, which relies on natural resources and access to shipping routes, the knowledge economy relies on science, which is mobile, globally distributed, and reproducible. Nations and cities that can train and keep world-class scientists and engineers will excel, while those with a weak pipeline of talent will fall behind.
One might think that the United States, as a longtime scientific leader, would be well-placed to capitalize on this trend. One might be wrong.
At a well-attended "creationist" museum in Kentucky, for example, families can see a Biblically-inspired version of the Earth's history that is directly at odds with Darwinian evolution, biology's central organizing principle. "This is what's out there, and school children are going to this, being taught that the Earth is only 5000 years old," said Kroto, whose home state of Florida routinely elects politicians with similarly antiscientific beliefs.
Reach out and teach someone
Education, wealth, and economic development are tightly linked.
While the United States shoots itself in the foot by miseducating the future workforce, Latin America struggles with a different set of problems, including a lack of funding for schools, geographical barriers that separate teachers from students, and tremendous disparities in access to technology. The impacts are clear. Only about half of Latin Americans finish high school, those who do score consistently low on internationally standardized science tests, and the region produces relatively few PhD-level scientists and engineers.
"Education isn't a panacea, there are a lot of traditional things that need to be addressed, [such as] reinforcing social programs," said Juan Romero, president and CEO of Pearson Education Latin America, but he added that education, combating poverty, and economic development are tightly linked. Better education may not be sufficient for an economic revival, but it is necessary.
A progress report on a distance learning program begun in Mexico in 2007.
To address some of the region's biggest educational problems, Romero and his colleagues are developing and distributing distance learning software. Taking classes via the Internet is often considered inferior to traditional classroom approaches, but it has distinct advantages in some areas. For example, students who fall behind the rest of the class are often difficult to reach in a classroom. "When you do a traditional environment of instructor-led classroom only, it's very expensive to address the remediation," said Romero. Several projects have demonstrated that new software-based approaches can improve remedial math students' success rates up to 40%, while cutting teaching costs in half.
Distance learning technology and educational software aren't the only places where science education can improve, though. Indeed, the older tools of traditional classrooms are still far from perfect, even in some of the world's most advanced educational systems.
Carl Johan Sundberg of the Karolinska Institute gave the example of basic biology textbooks, which have been a staple of science teaching for more than a century: "When I wrote a textbook I found out [in] the last 30 years almost no scientist had written a textbook of biology in Sweden ... for kids 12–16 years old." Previous editions of that nation's standard text, usually prepared by science journalists, were well-written but not current enough for a modern biology class.
Sundberg and other Swedish scientists have also been making a concerted effort to bring cutting-edge science to the general public, through a combination of open forums, public seminars, and media education campaigns. "We brought science and scientists out to the open so to speak," said Sundberg, adding that "it is possible, it is fun, and there's a lot to learn."
Re-engineering the pipeline
Besides doing a better job educating the general public, societies need to do a better job training the next generation of scientific and engineering professionals. As Dartmouth College's Joseph Helble argued, engineers are particularly important for putting science to practical use—in other words, for a nation's or a city's success in the knowledge economy.
Traditionally, engineering schools have focused on training people to design products and infrastructure. But is that what really inspires students to go into the field?
The classic example of engineering recruitment is Sputnik, the pioneering 1957 Soviet satellite that allegedly inspired a generation of American students to enter engineering. "Not so," said Helble. Graphing the number of engineering students in the country over the course of the 20th century, he showed that enrollments barely rose through the 1950s and 60s, but spiked dramatically during the 1970s oil crisis. "Engineering in the United States did not show significant increases until there was this immediate connection to global problems and the need for engineers to solve them," said Helble.
As another global oil crunch joins a menagerie of other looming crises, Helble and his colleagues have started a new graduate-level engineering program at Dartmouth. Focused on training engineers to address specific global challenges, the program also promotes entrepreneurship. Students in the program are already translating their thesis projects into early-stage companies, allowing them to reap the rewards of their work immediately.
Besides helping students get ahead individually, better science and engineering education can advance entire nations. Nobel laureate Robert Richardson, who recently helped prepare an influential report on this subject for the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, argued that even during the 20th century, much of the country's tremendous economic growth was driven by homegrown science and innovation. The gathering storm of resource shortages and global competition makes educating the next generation of researchers even more important.
Technology to Marketplace
Highlights
- Clear intellectual property laws and a critical mass of entrepreneurs are essential for innovation.
- To attract the scientific workforce for a knowledge economy, cities need to provide more than bare necessities.
- Universities must be careful to preserve their core values when commercializing their research.
- Relatively small, strategic investments can have enormous influence in getting new technologies to the marketplace.
Where the rubber meets the road
Once Mexico City chooses a general model for innovation and decides how to train the workforce for that system, the final step of the process will be to bring real technologies to the marketplace. That step, which is really the essence of innovation, was the focus of the meeting's final session.
MIT's Carlos Martinez-Vela, one of the world's foremost thinkers on this issue, summarized the results of his own in-depth studies of innovation at the meeting. Martinez-Vela's widely-cited findings form the foundation of the university-led, entrepreneurial approach to technology transfer that most experts in the field now advocate.
Other speakers in the session focused on the details of implementing this approach. The Academy's own René Bastón, formerly a technology transfer administrator for Columbia University, discussed the strategies universities can use to commercialize faculty research. It's not simply a matter of patenting inventions and selling them; universities must be careful not to undercut their core educational missions in the quest to make a profit. "Universities are both engines of knowledge and economic engines, and there is a tension between those two possibilities," said Bastón, adding that "in the middle of this lies technology transfer."
Clear intellectual property laws can spur technology development.
In the United States, revenues from technology transfer show a marked inflection point in 1980, when Congress passed the landmark Bayh-Dole Act. The law defined clear ownership rights for the results of government-sponsored research, and spurred universities to patent and license their innovations, making them much more attractive to industry.
The results have been dramatic, with one estimate showing $40 billion in economic activity now stemming from commercialized university research. Bastón said that for Mexico to achieve similar success, the nation will need to establish much clearer intellectual property laws for its universities: "Clearly this is one of the challenges of creating technology and knowledge transfer and innovation."
Show me the money
With more efficient technology transfer, Mexico's universities would be especially well placed to capitalize on the biotechnology revolution. As Dennis Purcell of the Perseus-Soros Biopharmaceutical Fund explained, foreign biotechnology investment in the country has doubled in the past ten years, and nearly 3000 biotechnology-based therapies are now being tested in the country. Adding innovations from Mexico City's own life sciences labs to that pipeline would keep more of the profits local.
Strained energy supplies have whet investors' appetites for new technologies.
Commercializing new discoveries also requires investment, though, and many of the business leaders at the meeting were undoubtedly wondering where that money will come from. According to Russell Read, venture capitalists are ready and eager to help, especially in fields where older technologies are reaching their limits.
The growing global energy crisis provides a good example. Soaring consumption, stretched supplies, and catastrophic environmental damage are placing enormous strains on the world's energy sector. That makes new energy technologies very attractive. "We love these stress conditions, they create the conditions for innovation, the conditions for investment, so from a pure investment standpoint we couldn't be more excited," said Read.
Venture capitalists are also keen to invest in new building technologies, and Mexico City, which has a tremendous need for new residential and commercial structures, could become a hotbed of innovation in construction. "This is an area that has been long overdue for innovations in materials and approaches," said Read.
An influx of private investment could help compensate for a dearth of government funding in some areas, particularly energy. "The largest U.S. pharmaceutical company spends twice as much on R&D as the United States government is spending on R&D in energy," said MIT's Bill Bonvillian, adding that "These funding levels are not going to make a technology revolution."
For companies willing to invest in energy, the potential rewards are obvious. "In the United States alone, it's a $2 trillion sector, so you don't have to invent a whole new sector, you've got ... money on the table," said Bonvillian. Despite that, U.S. energy companies still invest much less in research and development than any other industry. Bonvillian argued that a combination of incentives, ranging from prizes to government funding for energy demonstration projects, could help spur more innovation in this field.
Seeking leverage
Nor do investments have to be huge to make a big difference. Describing the work of the New York City Investment Fund, Maria Gotsch explained how relatively small, strategically distributed dollops of money can wield disproportionate influence in innovation.
For example, New York has long given short shrift to biotechnology investment; the city receives more federal research funding than Boston, but has less than a fifth as much commercial lab space. "That tells you we're doing all the hard work at the universities, but when you get to commercialize it and the companies start to pay taxes and hire people, they do it somewhere else," said Gotsch. To combat that problem, the Fund has invested in lobbying efforts and outreach programs. For an expenditure of only $50–$60 million, Gotch and her colleagues have now persuaded private companies to pump over $500 million into the city's biotechnology infrastructure.
Small investments in innovation can yield big dividends.
Gotsch split her speaking time with Bill Haseltine, a researcher, inventor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist, who discussed how similar targeted funding strategies can work in developing countries. In one effort in India, a small initial investment by a private foundation helped a company build a rapid-response emergency medical system. The new system is analogous to the U.S. "911" network, but it operates at a fraction of the cost of the American system. The key, Haseltine explained, was taking advantage of India's world-renowned call centers and software developers to optimize the network's efficiency.
Roberto Tapia-Conyer of the Carso Health Institute is also using strategic investments to improve public services, especially healthcare. In Mexico City, Tapia-Conyer and his colleagues have already started deploying a suite of software applications to help patients manage chronic conditions. Simply by sending a text message or signing up through a simple Web-based form, people with conditions such as AIDS or heart disease can now receive a variety of services, including regular medication reminders, appointment scheduling assistance, and secure storage for their electronic medical records.
As the meeting drew to a close, attendees were tired but upbeat. While nobody knows exactly what the future knowledge-driven economy will look like, its outlines are clearly starting to emerge. Success in this economy will happen in places where cutting-edge science, entrepreneurial talent, and diverse cultures can meet. In other words, places like Mexico City.
Science and Technology Institutions in Mexico
Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT)
Mexico's Science Consulting Council of the Presidency of the Republic (CCC) is composed of researchers, technologists, and scholars who have been honored with the National Science and Arts Award, and has a twofold mission: advising the country's president on matters pertaining to science and technology (C&T), and on problems that require the most sophisticated application of specialized knowledge.
Instituto de Ciencia y Tecnología del Distrito Federal (ICyTDF)
The Institute for Science and Technology of the Federal District (ICyTDF) is a government institution established by Marcelo Ebrard Casaubon. Its purpose is to solve the problems of the city through the use of science and technology.
Unidad Mérida del Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados (CINVESTAV)
Established in 1980, the Mérida, Yucatan, unit is part of a visionary program to decentralize and promote the development of science and technology in México, contributing to regional development.
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
The Center for Genomic Sciences at UNAM is devoted to scientific research (see Research programs) and undergraduate and graduate education (see Education@CCG) in genomics. It is located in the Morelos Campus of UNAM in Cuernavaca, state of Morelos.
Health & Genomics
Web Sites
Genomics Resources
Human Genome Project
Completed in 2003, the Human Genome Project (HGP) was a 13-year project coordinated by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health. During the early years of the HGP, the Wellcome Trust (U.K.) became a major partner; additional contributions came from Japan, France, Germany, China, and others.
The Human Genome: Your Genes, Your Health, Your Future
This Web site aims to provide readers with key information about the human genome: the science, its role in health and medicine, and the broader social impact of unraveling its mysteries. The site is produced by the Wellcome Trust, the independent research funding charity in the UK that aims to improve human and animal health.
Human Genome Organisation (HUGO)
The Human Genome Organisation is an international coordinating scientific body for research on the human genome.
J. Craig Venter Institute: Infectious Disease Research
One of the longstanding research focus areas at the JCVI is microbial and viral genomics and how those relate to human infectious disease.
U.S. National Office of Public Health Genomics
The National Office of Public Health Genomics (NOPHG) promotes the integration of genomics into public health research, policy, and practice in order to improve the lives and health of all people. Public Health Genomics is an emerging field that assesses the impact of genes and their interaction with behavior, diet, and the environment on population health.
WHO | The Genomic Resource Center
The Genomic Resource Centre (GRC) has been developed by World Health Organizations's Human Genetics Programme to provide information and to raise awareness on human genetics and more recently human genomics, a new and rapidly developing science. This site provides an overview of the issues and concerns around human genetics and public health and, in particular, addresses the ethical, legal and social implications (ELSI) of genomics.
Journal Articles
Walter Bodmer
Bodmer W, Bonilla C. 2008. Common and rare variants in multifactorial susceptibility to common diseases. Nat. Genet. 40: 695-701.
Bodmer WF. 2006. Cancer genetics: colorectal cancer as a model. J. Hum. Genet. 51: 391-396. Full Text
Conaghan P, Ashraf S, Tytherleigh M, et al. 2008. Targeted killing of colorectal cancer cell lines by a humanised IgG1 monoclonal antibody that binds to membrane-bound carcinoembryonic antigen. Br. J. Cancer 8: 1217-1225. Full Text
Ntouroupi TG, Ashraf SQ, McGregor SB, et al. 2008. Detection of circulating tumour cells in peripheral blood with an automated scanning fluorescence microscope. Br. J. Cancer 99: 789-795.
Thomas Caskey
Beaudet AL, Belmont JW. 2008. Array-based DNA diagnostics: let the revolution begin. Annu. Rev. Med. 59: 113-129.
van de Vijver MJ, He YD, van't Veer LJ, et al. 2002. A gene-expression signature as a predictor of survival in breast cancer. N. Engl. J. Med. 347: 1999-2009.
Wolins NE, Quaynor BK, Skinner JR, et al. 2005. S3-12, Adipophilin, and TIP47 package lipid in adipocytes. J. Biol. Chem. 280: 19146-19155.
Esther Orozco
Asgharzadeh M, Kafil HS. 2007. Current trends in molecular epidemiology studies of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Biotechnol. Mol. Biol. Rev. 2: 108-115. (PDF, 434 KB)
Hahn BH, Shaw GM, De Cock KM, et al. 2000. AIDS as a zoonosis: scientific and public health implications. Science 287: 607-614.
Morens DM, Folkers GK, Fauci AS. 2004. The challenge of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. Nature 40: 242-249.
Urban Infrastructure
Web Sites
Climate Change and Energy
Energy Information Administration
Provides official energy statistics from the U.S. government.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
The IPCC Working Group I Fourth Assessment Report Summary for Policymakers (PDF, 1.25 MB), focusing on the scientific basis for climate change, is now available, as is a summary of the Working Group II report on climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability, and the Working Group III report on mitigation of climate change.
International Energy Agency
The International Energy Agency (IEA) acts as energy policy advisor to 28 member countries in their effort to ensure reliable, affordable and clean energy for their citizens. Current work focuses on climate change policies, market reform, energy technology collaboration and outreach to the rest of the world, especially major consumers and producers of energy like China, India, Russia and the OPEC countries. The IEA conducts a broad program of energy research, data compilation, publications, and public dissemination of the latest energy policy analysis and recommendations on good practices.
World Alliance for Decentralized Energy
WADE works to accelerate the worldwide development of high efficiency cogeneration, onsite power, and decentralized renewable energy systems that deliver substantial economic and environmental benefits.
Public Health
Carso Health Institute
The Carso Health Institute is a not-for-profit organization that mobilizes private resources to finance projects of social interest in the areas of health, nutrition, and the environment.
Seguro Popular
The national health insurance program of Mexico provides access to health care and financial protection against the impact of catastrophic disease to 50 million mostly poor Mexicans, who had been previously excluded from medical insurance. It has a healthy pregnancy program, coverage to ensure children's health, and more.
Infrastructure and Sustainability
The CONSENSUS Institute
The CONSENSUS Institute for CONStructed Environments and Sustainable Urban Systems is a not-for-profit corporation, dedicated to the long-term sustainability and resiliency of the built environment.
Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals
The Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals is a nonprofit professional organization that publishes the Annual State of Logistics report for its members, and provides case studies in supply chain management.
Foster + Partners—Duisburg Inner Harbour Masterplan
The largest inland harbor in the world, Duisburg Inner Harbor's renewal provided the opportunity to test, at a large scale, ideas about mixed use and sustainability. The master plan aims to draw the life of the city to the waterfront, establishing the harbor as an attractive place in which to live and work.
National Academy of Engineering: Grand Challenges for Engineering
Among the grand challenges for engineering identified by an international group of leading technological thinkers are to restore and improve urban infrastructure, to provide access to clean water, develop carbon sequestration methods, and to make solar energy economical.
The Vertical Farm Project
Dickson Despommier's organization advocates using urban land to build multistory buildings in which crops are grown under controlled conditions.
Books and Articles
Julio Frenk
Frenk J. 2008. Group Carso, health philanthropy, and tobacco. Lancet 371: 1243-1244.
Frenk J. 2006. Comprehensive reform to improve health system performance in Mexico. Lancet 368: 1524-1534.
Frenk J. 2006. Bridging the divide: global lessons from evidence-based health policy in Mexico. Lancet 368: 954-961.
Whitelegg J. 1993. Transport for a Sustainable Future: The Case for Europe. John Wiley and Sons, New York.
Green Technology
Web Sites
Earth System Research Laboratory, NOAA
The Global Monitoring Division's mission is to observe and understand—through accurate, long-term records of atmospheric gases, aerosol particles, and solar radiation—the Earth's atmospheric system controlling climate forcing, ozone depletion, and baseline air quality.
Economics in Depth: The Pew Center on Global Climate Change
The objective of the Pew Center's Economics Program is to advance public and private policy-makers' understanding of the complex interactions between the climate change problem and the economy.
Global Wind Energy Council
The global wind energy council is the global forum for the wind energy sector, uniting the wind industry and its representative associations.
International Emissions Trading Association
IETA is dedicated to the objectives of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and ultimately climate protection: the establishment of effective market-based trading systems for greenhouse gas emissions by businesses that are demonstrably fair, open, efficient, accountable, and consistent across national boundaries; and maintaining societal equity and environmental integrity while establishing these systems.
International Solar Energy Society (ISES)
ISES has been serving the needs of the renewable energy community since its founding in 1954. A UN-accredited NGO present in more than 50 countries, the Society supports its members in the advancement of renewable energy technology, implementation, and education all over the world.
Books and Articles
Robert Engle
Carmody J, Ritchie D. 2007. Investing in clean energy and low carbon alternatives in Asia. Asian Development Bank, Philippines. (PDF, 3.29 MB)
Engle RF. 1982. Autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity with estimates of the variance of U.K. inflation. Econometrica 50: 987-1008.
Engle RF, Kozicki S. 1993. Testing for common features. Journal of Business and Economic Statistics 11: 369-380.
Engle RF, Rangel JG. 2006. The spline-GARCH model for low frequency volatility and macroeconomic causes. (PDF, 686 KB)
Juan Luis Peña
Hernández MP, Alonso CF, Martel A, et al. 2000. Barrier height behavior for In/CdTe polycrystalline junction. Phys. Status Solidi (b) 220: 209-213.
Meinardi S, Nissenson P, Barletta B, et al. 2008. Influence of the public transportation system on the air quality of a major urban center. A case study: Milan, Italy. C7915-7923.
Menéndez-Proupin E, Gutiérrez G, Palmero E, Peña JL. 2004. Electronic structure of binary and ternary components of CdTe:O thin films. Phys. Status Solidi (c) 1: S104-S107.
Zapata-Torres M, Chalé-Lara F, Castro-Rodríguez R, et al. 2005. Production of thin CdSxTe1-x films with cubic structure for 0<= x <=1. Rev. Mex. Fis. 51: 138-143.
Sherwood Rowland
Baker AK, Beyersdorf AJ, Doezema LA, et al. 2008. Measurements of nonmethane hydrocarbons in 28 United States cities. Atmos. Environ., 42: 170-182. doi:10.1016/j.atmosenv.2007.09.007
Barletta B, Meinardi S, Simpson IJ, et al. 2008. Ambient mixing ratios of nonmethane hydrocarbons (NMHCs) in two major urban centers of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region: Guangzhou and Dongguan. Atmos. Environ. 42: 4393-4408.
Rowland FS. 1990. Earth's changing atmosphere: chlorofluorocarbons and ozone. Environ. Impact Asses. 10: 359-370.
Innovation Models
Web Sites
GMEC—Global Medical Excellence Cluster
GMEC, the largest Global Medical Excellence Cluster in Europe, brings together leading universities, pharmaceutical and medical device companies, and hospitals to build the capabilities which will ensure the UK remains globally competitive in medical research. The goals include improved innovation and product development, more productive leading edge research activity, new employment opportunities, and enhanced patient outcomes.
The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
ITIF is a nonpartisan research and educational institute—a think tank—whose mission is to formulate and promote public policies to advance technological innovation and productivity internationally, in Washington, and in individual states within the U.S. Recognizing the vital role of technology in ensuring American prosperity, ITIF focuses on innovation, productivity, and digital economy issues.
Innovate America, Council on Competitiveness
This Web site contains a wealth of information about efforts to encourage innovation in the U.S., including the National Innovation Initiative final report, and information about legislation aimed at promoting innovation.
Polytechnic Institute of NYU
Polytechnic Institute of NYU, founded in 1854 in Brooklyn, New York, is an important resource in science, technology, research, and management education in the metropolitan area.
Vinnova (Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems)
VINNOVA is a Swedish government agency working to enhance the growth and prosperity throughout the country. Its special responsibility is innovations linked to research and development—that is innovative, successful products, services or processes with scientific basis. Its tasks are to finance the needs of reasoned research as a competitive economy and a prosperous society needs, and to strengthen the networks that are necessary around the work.
Books and Articles
Innovation
Archibugi D, Iammarino S. 2002. The globalization of technological innovation: definition and evidence. Rev. Int. Polit. Econ. 9: 98-122. (PDF, 213 KB)
2008 Global R&D Report: Changes in the R&D Community. R&D Magazine (September, 2007) (PDF, 1.38 MB)
Atkinson RD. 2007. The Globalization of R&D and Innovation: How Do Companies Choose Where to Build R&D Facilities? Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (October 7).
Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century: An Agenda for American Science and Technology, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine. 2007. Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing & Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future. The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C.
Globalization Alters Traditional R&D Rules. 2006. Battelle Global R&D Magazine (September) (PDF, 781 KB).
Gonzalez-Brambila C, Lever J, Veloso F. 2007. Mexico's Innovation Cha-Cha. Issues in Science and Technology (Fall).
Hill C. 2007. The post-scientific society. Issues in Science and Technology (Fall).
Keeping America Competitive. 2008. Business Week (September 22).
Lester RK. 2005. Universities, innovation, and the competitiveness of local economies: A summary report from the local innovation systems project – Phase I. Industrial Performance Center. Massachusetts Institute of Technology IPC working paper series. MIT-IPC-05-010 (PDF, 3.17 MB)
Measuring regional innovation. 2005. Council on Competitiveness (October).
Par Hansson, Karpaty P, Lindvert M, et al. 2008. Summary: Swedish business sector in a globalized world. Swedish Institute for Growth Policy Studies (ITPS). (PDF, 94.6 KB)
Pew NGA Report – Investing in Innovation. 2007. National Governors Association (NGA) Center for Best Practices and the Pew Center on the States. (PDF, 1.81 MB)
Toffler A, Toffler H. 2007. Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives. Doubleday, New York.
Toffler A. 1984. Future Shock. Bantam Books, New York.
Toffler A. 1990. Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century. Bantam Books, New York.
Clusters
Action MedTech—Key Measures for Growing the Medical Device Industry in Sweden. 2007. Royal Institute of Technology, Karolinska Institutet, Karolinska University Hospital (December). (PDF, 2.58 MB)
Life Sciences Industry Cluster Strategy for Shanghai-Pudong. 2005. Monitor Group (November). (490 KB)
Rural clusters of Innovation: Berkshires Strategy Project. 2006. United States Department of Commerce, Berkshire Economic Development Corporation, Monitor Company Group, LLP. (PDF, 606 KB)
Super Cluster: Ideas, perspectives, and trends shaping the global impact of the Massachusetts life sciences industry. Vol. II. 2008. PriceWaterhouseCoopers (June).
Pipeline of Talent
Web Sites
B@UNAM
B @ UNAM is the option offered by the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico to Mexican migrants in the United States to attend high school (equivalent to high school) at a distance with materials developed in their mother tongue. It is aimed at those who, for various reasons, have not been able to attend school in person. This high school will be taught remotely from the four UNAM sites, three in the U.S., located in San Antonio, Texas; Chicago, Illinois; and Los Angeles, California; and one in Canada, located in the country's capital, Ottawa–Gatineau.
EuroScience Open Forum 2004
The first Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF2004) was held at Stockholm City Conference Centre in Stockholm, Sweden, August 25–28, 2004. More than 1800 persons participated (of which 350 were international journalists), in this first pan-European scientific meeting staged to provide an interdisciplinary forum for open dialogue, debate, and discussion on science and technology in society.
Karolinska Institute
The Karolinska Institute is one of Europe's largest medical universities. It is also Sweden's largest center for medical training and research. Its mission is to improve the health of mankind through research and education.
Keeping Pace k-12
Keeping Pace provides an annual review of U.S. state-level policy and practice of online education, as well as other reports.
Naturejobs.com
Articles about science careers from the journal Nature.
North American Council for Online Learning (NACOL)
NACOL strives to ensure all students have access to a world-class education and quality online learning opportunities that prepare them for a lifetime of success.
NSF Division of Science and Engineering Statistics
Publications, data, and analyses about U.S. science and engineering resources.
OECD Programme for International student Assessment (PISA)
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an internationally standardized assessment that was jointly developed by participating countries and administered to15-year-olds in schools.
PREAL—Programa de Promocion de la reforma educative de America Latina y el Caribe
PREAL's mission is to improve the quality, equity, and efficiency of education in Latin America by helping governments and civil society to promote informed debate on education policy, identify and disseminate best practices, and monitor progress toward improvement.
PhD Innovation Program at Dartmouth College
The Thayer School at Dartmouth College offers the United State's first doctoral-level engineering Innovation Program meant to provide PhD graduates with the entrepreneurial training they need to turn research discoveries into marketable applied technologies.
Science Alliance
The New York Academy of Sciences' Science Alliance for Students and Postdocs is a consortium of universities, teaching hospitals, and independent research facilities in the New York City metro area and around the world. Its goal is to provide unparalleled career and professional development mentoring for students and postdocs in the sciences and engineering, through a series of live events and a dedicated web portal.
Science Careers
A comprehensive guide to science careers from the journal Science.
Technology to Marketplace
Web Sites
Association of University Technology Managers
AUTM is dedicated to promoting and supporting technology transfer through education, advocacy, networking, and communication.
Better World Project
The Association of University Technology Managers, an international nonprofit membership organization, launched the Better World Project in 2005 to promote public understanding of how academic research and technology transfer benefits you, your community, and millions of people around the world.
Columbia University Science and Technology Ventures
As Columbia University's technology transfer organization, Science and Technology Ventures (STV) serves as a bridge between Columbia's faculty and researchers and the business community. STV's core objective is to transfer inventions and innovative knowledge from the University to outside organizations and society at large.
Licensing Executives Society, USA and Canada
Established in 1965, the Licensing Executives Society (U.S.A. and Canada), Inc. (LES) is a professional society comprised of over 6,000 members engaged in the transfer, use, development, manufacture and marketing of intellectual property. The society publishes Les Nouvelles, a technology transfer and licensing journal.
National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Energy Analysis
Analysis at NREL aims to increase the understanding of the current and future characteristics, roles, and interactions of government, markets, and technologies. The acquired understanding is used to inform technology, benefits, market, policy, and program decisions as energy efficient and renewable energy technologies advance from concept to commercial application. NREL also works with industry and organizations to transfer renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies into the marketplace.
New Energy Finance
New Energy Finance is a specialist provider of information and research to investors in renewable energy, low-carbon technology, and the carbon markets.
New York City Investment Fund
The New York City Investment Fund is a private fund with a civic mission. The Fund was established in late 1996, under the auspices of the nonprofit The Partnership for New York City. The Fund has built a network of top experts from the investment and corporate communities who help identify and support New York City's most promising entrepreneurs in both the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors.
Simmons & Company International
Simmons & Company is the only independent investment bank specializing in the entire spectrum of the energy industry. Their Web site contains statistics and analysis of the sector.
WorldTel
WorldTel invests in and develops telecoms and Internet companies in emerging markets. It invests private equity capital to help start-up and early stage operating companies establish themselves and develop operations that provide service. WorldTel was created by the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) and is wholly owned by global corporations interested in investing in telecom and Internet infrastructure operations.
Books
Berger S. 2005. How We Compete: What Companies Around the World Are Doing to Make it in Today's Global Economy. Doubleday Business, New York.
Kim L. 1997. Imitation to Innovation: the Dynamics of Korea's Technological Learning (Management of Innovation and Change Series). Harvard Business Press, Cambridge, MA.
Nelson RR, ed. 1993. National Innovation Systems: A Comparative Analysis. Oxford University Press, New York, NY.
Romer P. 1990. Endogenous Technological Change. J. Polit. Econ., Vol. 98, No. 5, Part 2: "The Problem of Development: A Conference on the Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise Systems." pp. S71-S102.
Perez C. 2003. Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages. Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, Northampton, MA.
Keynote Speakers
Robert Engle, PhD
New York University Stern School of Business
web site
Robert Engle, the Michael Armellino Professor of Finance at New York University Stern School of Business, was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Economics for his research on the concept of autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH). He developed this method for statistical modeling of time-varying volatility and demonstrated that these techniques accurately capture the properties of many time series. Engle shared the prize with Clive W. J. Granger of the University of California, San Diego.
Engle is an expert in time series analysis with a long-standing interest in the analysis of financial markets. His ARCH model and its generalizations have become indispensable tools not only for researchers, but also for analysts of financial markets, who use them in asset pricing and in evaluating portfolio risk. His research has also produced such innovative statistical methods as cointegration, common features, autoregressive conditional duration (ACD), CAViaR, and now dynamic conditional correlation (DCC) models.
Before joining NYU Stern in 2000, Engle was Chancellor's Associates Professor and economics department chair at the University of California, San Diego, and associate professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He received his master of science in physics and doctor of philosophy in economics from Cornell University.
Jerry Hultin
Polytechnic Institute of NYU
web site | publications
Throughout his career, Jerry Hultin, 10th President of Polytechnic University, has been an innovator in the worlds of government, business, and higher education.
A graduate of Ohio State University and Yale University Law School, Hultin spent more than 25 years in Ohio and Washington, DC, on the cutting edge of the practice of law, management of small businesses, and business consulting in areas including technology, defense, health care, finance, and the environment.
From 1997 to 2000, Hultin served as under secretary of the Navy, the department's number two civilian leader. In this position, he created new programs to support innovation and strategy in warfare and business operations to meet the needs of the Navy and Marine Corps in the global 21st century. From 2000 to 2005, Hultin served as the dean of the Wesley J. Howe School of Technology Management and professor of management at Stevens Institute of Technology.
Hultin is currently guiding Poly through an historic merger with New York University and creating what will be one of the most innovative research and technology universities in New York City and the world. The new Polytechnic Institute of New York University will infuse its curriculum with invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship in order to encourage students and faculty to reach new heights in using science, engineering, and technology management to solve the problems of the increasingly global 21st century.
Harold Kroto, PhD
Florida State University
web site | publications
Harold Kroto is the Francis Eppes Professor of Chemistry at Florida State University in Tallahassee and a professor emeritus at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. He is a graduate of the University of Sheffield.
Kroto's fascination with spectroscopy, which allows for the identification and study of different types of molecules based on how they absorb or emit light or other kinds of electromagnetic radiation, led him to quantum chemistry, his main area of research. Using microwaves as opposed to visible light, he discovered long, chainlike carbon molecules in the atmospheres of stars and their associated gas clouds; attempts to re-create such carbon chains in the laboratory led to the discovery of a previously unknown form of carbon known as buckminsterfullerene; given their resemblance to soccer balls, these molecules are commonly called buckyballs.
The discovery of buckyballs opened up an entirely new branch of chemistry and earned Kroto the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Tubular assemblies of carbon atoms, which are a close kin to the buckyballs, play a central role in Kroto's current main area of research: nanoscience.
Kroto is a staunch supporter of science education and in 1995 set up the Vega Science Trust, which creates high-quality science films for network broadcast.
Rajendra K. Pachauri, PhD
The Energy and Resources Institute
web site
Rajendra Pachauri is chief executive of the Energy and Resources Institute, North America. He was chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore. He has served on several international and national committees, including the Economic Advisory Council and the Advisory Board on Energy (ABE), which report to the Prime Minister of India. He is a senior advisor to the administrator of the United Nations Development Programme. He has been president and chairman of the International Association for Energy Economics, and president of the Asian Energy Institute. In April 1999 he was appointed member of the board of directors of the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, Japan, and continues to hold this appointment. In acknowledgement of his contributions to environmental studies, Pachauri was awarded the Padma Bhushan, one of India's highest civilian awards for distinguished service to the nation. The President of India also awarded him the Padma Vibhushan, the second highest civilian award, for his services in the field of science and engineering. Pachauri has PhDs in industrial engineering and economics.
Sam Pitroda
National Knowledge Commission of India
web site
Sam Pitroda is an internationally respected development thinker, telecom inventor, and entrepreneur who has spent 40 years in information and communications technology and related human and national developments. Credited with having laid the foundation for and ushering in India's technology and telecommunications revolution in the1980s, Pitroda has been a leading campaigner to help bridge the global digital divide.
During his tenure as advisor to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in the 1980s, Pitroda headed six technology missions related to telecommunications, water, literacy, immunization, dairy, and oil seeds. He was also the founder and first chairman of India's Telecom Commission.
Currently he is chairman of India's National Knowledge Commission, reporting to the Prime Minister. The commission's mandate is to offer a series of recommendations on how to leverage India's knowledge strengths to help it become a knowledge economy.
He holds close to 100 worldwide patents and has published and lectured widely in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
Russell Read, PhD
C Change Investments
web site
Prior to founding C Change Investments in 2008, Russell Read served as chief investment officer for America's largest pension fund, the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS). During his tenure, he made CalPERS a leader in clean technology and environmental investments, while producing superior returns among public pension plans. Read also served as chairman of the Investors' Committee for the President's Working Group on Financial Markets, establishing best practices for hedge fund investors.
Prior to CalPERS, Read served as deputy chief investment officer for Deutsche (Bank) Asset Management (Americas) and Scudder Investments and also served as head of quantitative investing, product design, risk management, and commodities investing at Oppenheimer Funds. He also held senior investment, portfolio management, and economist positions at Prudential, CNA Insurance, and First Chicago.
Read is a founder of the P8 Group of the world's eight largest pension systems coordinating towards scalable green investment solutions. He was recognized by SmartMoney in 2007 in its Power 30 list of the most influential people in business and finance, and by Institutional Investor in 2008 as #35 on its list of the 75 most effective chief executives.
He received his undergraduate degree in statistics and his MBA in finance and international business both from the University of Chicago. He received his masters degree in economics and his doctorate in political economy from Stanford University. He is also a chartered financial analyst (CFA), a chartered life underwriter (CLU), and a chartered financial consultant (ChFC).
Robert C. Richardson, PhD
Cornell University
web site
Bob Richardson was born in 1937 in Washington, DC. He attended Virginia Polytechnic Institute between 1954 and 1960 where he obtained both BS and MS degrees in physics. He obtained his PhD in physics from Duke in 1966.
In 1966 he began work at Cornell University in the laboratory of David Lee. Their research goal was to observe the nuclear magnetic phase transition in solid 3He. In collaboration with Douglas Osheroff, a student who joined the group in 1967, they worked on cooling techniques and NMR instrumentation for studying low temperature helium liquids and solids. In the fall of 1971, they made the accidental discovery that liquid 3He undergoes a pairing transition similar to that of superconductors. The three were awarded the Nobel Prize for that work in 1996.
Richardson has been on the Cornell faculty since 1967. He is currently the F. R. Newman Professor of Physics and the director of the Kavli Institute at Cornell. During his tenure at Cornell he has led an active research program in studies of matter at very low temperatures. He has published more than 95 scientific articles in major research journals.
Having been active in teaching introductory physics at Cornell, Richardson is currently working with his wife, Betty Richardson, a senior lecturer in physics, and Alan Giambattista, both of Cornell, on the production of an introductory college physics textbook.
Sherwood Rowland, PhD
University of California, Irvine
web site
Sherwood Rowland is a professor of chemistry and earth system science at the University of California, Irvine. He has a PhD from the University of Chicago in physical chemistry. His research involves measurement of the atmospheric emission and accumulation of gaseous chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and methane, and their atmospheric consequences.
He was a co-recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (with Paul Crutzen and Mario Molina). The official press release stated, "By explaining the chemical mechanisms that affect the thickness of the ozone layer, the three researchers have contributed to our salvation from a global environmental problem that could have catastrophic consequences."
He is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and a foreign member of the Royal Society (UK). From 1994 to 2002, he was the foreign secretary of the National Academy of Sciences. During 1991 to 1993, he served as president and then chairman of the Board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. From 1994 to 2002, he was the foreign secretary of the National Academy of Sciences. He has received eleven U.S. honorary degrees and seven from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Italy, and Japan. He is the author of more than 400 scientific papers in the fields of atmospheric chemistry, radiochemistry, and chemical kinetics.
Hugo A. Santana
IBM Mexico
web site
Hugo Santana is CEO of IBM Mexico. From April 2007 until assuming his current responsibilities, he served as director of the finance sector of IBM Mexico. In 2002 he was appointed general manager of IBM Venezuela, which under his leadership registered 14 quarters of consistent growth and accelerated its service-oriented profile in the country through the Innovation Business Center.
In 2000, he was manager of the PC Division. According to IDC, under Santana's leadership, the division reported 50% growth in the Intel platform (PC's, laptops, and servers). During this period he was recognized with six awards from the corporation, including the LA Leader Award for his leadership at the regional level, and the 2001Golden Award. Hugo Santana was recognized with the Hundred Percent Club Award in 2004, 2005, and 2006. In 2006, Santana won the Best General Manager Award from Revista Gerente.
Santana has a masters degree in information systems from the Andres Bello Catholic University, and has an Advanced Diploma in Management from the prestigious Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración (IESA) in Venezuela.
Rajeev Sethi
Asian Heritage Foundation
web site
Rajeev Sethi is noted internationally for his innovative contribution to preserving and celebrating South Asia's rich cultural heritage. For over three decades, through his work in design and architecture, exhibitions and festivals, he has identified ways to bring contemporary relevance to the time-honored skills of traditional artists and artisans, thereby creating a basis for their continued livelihood in an era of industrialization and globalization.
Sethi was born in New Delhi and received his formative education in history. In college, he held one-man shows of his paintings, batiks, and mixed media works, earning him French and Indian government scholarships to study in Paris. Sethi is the founder of the Asian Heritage Foundation in New Delhi.
Alvin Toffler
web site
Alvin Toffler is an American writer and futurist, known for his works discussing digital, communications, and corporate revolutions and technological singularity. His early work focused on technology and its impact (through effects like information overload). Then he moved to examining the reaction of and changes in society. His later focus has been on the increasing power of 21st century military hardware, weapons and technology proliferation, and capitalism. Toffler literally invented the role of the futurist with the publication of his seminal work, Future Shock, creating an all new discipline around the study of change and its impact on business and culture.
Throughout his long career, Toffler has remained one of the world's most prescient, insightful, and influential voices in business and intellectual life. He has continued to produce creative ideas that define how we think about our world.
What makes Alvin Toffler so extraordinary is that he asks questions nobody else has thought of and then answers them by fundamentally redefining things in ways that keep making sense as the future unfolds. He's created several lasting thought paradigms—new frameworks for understanding ourselves and the way we change—that offer invaluable strategic advantage to those who are paying attention. And he pegs these frameworks with predictions and insights that consistently verify that his sense of direction is right on.
Health & Genomics
Walter Bodmer, PhD
University of Oxford
web site | publications
Walter Bodmer completed his PhD with R. A. Fisher at Cambridge University in population genetics and then did his postdoctoral work with Joshua Lederberg at Stanford University. Later, as a member of the Stanford faculty, he initiated work with his wife, Julia Bodmer, and with Rose Payne, that contributed to the discovery of the HLA system, as well as advances in somatic cell genetics.
In 1970, Walter Bodmer returned to the UK as chair of genetics at Oxford. In 1979, he accepted the directorship of research at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories in London and was appointed the first director-general of the Fund in 1991. In 1996, he returned to Oxford as principal of Hertford College until 2005, and is currently head of the ICRF Cancer and Immunogenetics Laboratory at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine.
Walter Bodmer was a leader in the Human Genome Project and was first a vice-president, and then the president of HUGO. He made major contributions to human population genetics, somatic cell genetics, understanding the HLA system, and cancer genetics, especially colorectal cancer.
Walter Bodmer was elected FRS in 1974, Knighted in 1986 for his contributions to science, is a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and is the recipient of more than 30 honorary degrees and memberships and fellowships of scientific and medical societies.
Thomas Caskey, MD
Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine
web site | publications
Thomas Caskey attended Duke University Medical School. As a research associate with Marshall Nirenberg at NIH, his work showed the universality of the genetic code for living organisms. While he was at NIH, he discovered the mechanism of code punctuation (stop) is translated by proteins, not tRNA. Caskey joined Baylor College of Medicine and was an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 1976 to 1994. During this period, he discovered the "triplet repeat" diseases (fragile X and myotonic dystrophy) and the molecular basis of "disease anticipation" (triplet expansion generation to generation). After a sabbatical at the MRC in Cambridge, he served as director of the NIH Genome Center at Baylor College of Medicine. In 1994 he became senior vice president for research at Merck. It was there that the adenoviral vector HIV vaccine was created by his research team.
Caskey became founding director and CEO of Cogene Biotech Ventures 2000. In 2006 he was appointed COO and director-/CEO-elect of the Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine and executive vice president of molecular medicine and genetics at the University of Texas Health Science Center-Houston. Currently he is the director and CEO of the Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine. Caskey is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the Royal Society of Medicine.
Julio Frenk, MD, MPH, PhD
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; CARSO Health Institute
web site | publications
Julio Frenk divides his time between Seattle and Mexico City. In Seattle, he serves as a senior fellow at the Global Health Program of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and is the chairman of the board of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. In Mexico City, he is the president of the Carso Health Institute, a foundation focusing on health systems innovations in Latin America.
Frenk served as minister of health of Mexico from 2000 to 2006. His administration was involved in an ambitious effort to provide universal health insurance which currently aids nearly 50 million, mostly poor Mexicans.
Frenk's career included executive positions at the World Health Organization and the Mexican Health Foundation. He was the founding director-general of the National Institute of Public Health of Mexico, is a visiting professor at Harvard University, and was awarded the position of national researcher in his country. His professional associations include the National Academy of Medicine of Mexico and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science in the U.S. He has authored 29 books and monographs including two best-selling novels for youth explaining the functions of the human body.
Frenk holds a medical degree from the National University of Mexico, as well as a master's of public health and a joint doctorate in medical care organization and sociology from the University of Michigan.
Esther Orozco, PhD
Science and Technology Institute of Mexico City
web site | publications
Esther Orozco is president of the Science and Technology Institute of Mexico City. She studied bacteriology and parasitology at the Autonomous University of Chihuahua. Orozco received her PhD from the Center for Research and Advanced Studies (CINVESTAV) and the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN). From 1995 to 2005 she was an International Howard Hughes Researcher. Orozco has been honored with the Women in Science award from Loreal-UNESCO, the Pasteur Medal, awarded by UNESCO and the Pasteur Institute, the Miguel Otero National Award from the Ministry of Health, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Fogarty Fellowship. Orozco has been named a distinguished citizen by the Honorable Congress of Chihuahua, Mexico, and received the Medal of Merit awarded by the Scientific Legislative Assembly of Mexico City, as well as many other awards.
Orozco has been a visiting professor at Harvard University, the Weizmann Institute, and the Cancer Institute in Amsterdam. She has given lectures in highly renowned institutes in the United States, Israel, Holland, Germany, France, Turkey, and other countries. She is a member of the advisory board of the Autonomous University of Mexico City.
Orozco has dedicated her career as a researcher to the study of genes and proteins involved in the virulence of Entamoeba hystolytica, a parasite that causes amebiasis, opening the way for the development of a future vaccine.
Rafael Palacios, MD, PhD
National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)
web site
Rafael Palacios received his MD in 1969 and his PhD in biochemistry at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1970. From 1970 to 1973 he did his postdoctoral training in molecular biology in the laboratory of R.T. Schimke at Stanford. He subsequently returned to Mexico to become a pioneer in the introduction of modern molecular biology. His collaboration with other scientists and students, in particular with Jaime Mora, resulted in the creation of the Nitrogen Fixation Research Center of the National University of Mexico in Cuernavaca. Palacios was its first director and his leadership resulted in the international recognition of this center. He currently runs a research laboratory, is an advisor to a committee for the development of genomic sciences in Mexico, and coordinates the Undergraduate Program on Genomic Sciences of the UNAM. Palacios has been recognized with the Scientific Prize of the Mexican Academy of Sciences, the Scientific Prize of the National University of Mexico, the National Prize of Sciences and Arts, the National Prize of the Private Foundation Ricardo J. Zevada, and the international TWAS Prize. He is an honorary professor of the National University of Mexico and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Urban Infrastructure
Dickson D. Despommier, PhD
Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health
web site | publications
Dickson Despommier is a professor of public health in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health in New York City, where he teaches medical ecology, environmental science, and microbiology. Medical ecology is an emerging science that focuses on direct environmental influences on human health. For nearly 30 years, Despommier has been involved in lab-based research on parasites and the health risk they pose to large segments of the poor population in the tropics. He has authored three books on the topic of parasites, including West Nile Story.
More recently, Despommier has turned his attention to new approaches to sustainable urban life. As founder and director of the Vertical Farm Project, he is looking into how agriculture can be adapted and integrated into city living. He envisions multistory indoor farming facilities that allow for year-round supplies of fresh, organic, and locally grown food. Such an endeavor could benefit the environment by returning existing farmland to nature and restoring the natural functions and services of the ecosystem.
Despommier has received awards both as an innovator and as a highly successful teacher; notably, in 2003, he was named "Teacher of the Year" by the American Medical Students Association, and he has earned the same distinction six times at Columbia. He will be featured by the Chicago Museum of Science & Industry in a major upcoming exhibit as one of ten great innovators.
Brandon Haw
Foster + Partners
web site
Brandon Haw obtained his bachelors degree in architecture from the Bartlett School in London and received his masters degree from Princeton University.
With 21 years experience at Foster + Partners, he has worked on numerous projects from the ITN Headquarters building in London to masterplans in Kings Cross, Barcelona, Washington, and India. He was the resident director for the Commerzbank Headquarters Building in Frankfurt, Europe's tallest and the world's first 'green' skyscraper. He later went on to design the Al Faisaliah Tower and mixed-use development in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In Canary Wharf, London, he was responsible for the HSBC World Headquarters tower and the Citicorp Headquarters building.
Returning to New York, where he had lived before joining Foster + Partners in 1987, he was responsible for the competition entry for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site after 9/11. He went on to design the 80-story Tower 2, currently under construction. Haw was also the senior partner responsible for the award-winning Hearst Tower on 57th Street, Manhattan's first gold LEED certified office tower. As leader of one of the practice's Design Groups over the past 4 years, with a wide portfolio of projects, his role has expanded more recently to be responsible for the practice's international development with a growing number of commisions in India and Latin America.
David M. Sweet
World Alliance for Decentralized Energy (WADE)
web site
David Sweet is the executive director of the World Alliance for Decentralized Energy (WADE) based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Prior to joining WADE, Sweet served as a director of the United States Energy Association, the U.S. arm of the World Energy Council, as executive director of the International LNG Alliance, vice president of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, an attorney in private practice, and as an expert witness on financial, rate, and permitting issues at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Sweet serves as president of the Natural Gas Roundtable, a member of the North American Energy Standards Board, a vice chairman of the ABA Section of Public Utility, Communications, and Transportation Law and its gas committee, a member of the World Energy Council Committee on Cleaner Fossil Fuel Systems, and on the board of advisors of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. Sweet also serves as a U.S. representative to the International Gas Union and is heading up the IGU study on regulation of the natural gas industry. He received his law degree with honors from George Washington University and an MBA from the University of Maryland.
Martin Wachs, PhD
RAND Corporation
web site
Martin Wachs is director of the Transportation, Space, and Technology Program and of the Supply Chain Policy Center at the RAND Corporation. Until the end of 2005 he was professor of civil & environmental engineering and professor of city & regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was also director of the Institute of Transportation Studies. He spent 25 years at UCLA, where he was chairman of the Department of Urban Planning.
Wachs is the author of 160 articles and four books on subjects related to relationships between transportation, land use, and air quality, transportation needs of the elderly, techniques for the evaluation of transportation systems, and the use of performance measurement in transportation planning. His research also addresses issues of equity in transportation policy, problems of crime in public transit systems, the response of transportation systems to natural disasters including earthquakes. His most recent work focuses on transportation finance in relation to planning and policy.
Wachs served on the executive committee of the Transportation Research Board for nine years and was the TRB chairman during the year 2000. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowships, a UCLA Alumni Association Distinguished Teaching Award, the Pyke Johnson Award for the best paper presented at an annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board, and the Carey Award for service to the TRB. He is a fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners and a lifetime associate of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2006 he was named "Member of the Year" by the San Francisco Chapter of the Women's Transportation Seminar and was awarded the lifetime achievement award as "Distinguished Planning Educator" by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning.
Green Technology
Cameron Brooks, PhD
IBM
web site
Cameron Brooks is the director of solutions and business development for the Big Green Innovations Group of IBM in Somers, NY. This is a new group within IBM focused on incubating and growing a portfolio of environmentally-focused initiatives. In 2008, one of the major objectives of this group is to grow an Advanced Water Management business for IBM. In his prior role, Cameron was program director for the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. He has been employed at IBM for 12 years, and has successfully led several initiatives involved in bringing innovative new technologies to market. Cameron has also held several technical roles in the Systems & Technology Group of IBM, having started his career in Burlington, Vermont as a Development Engineer in the Microelectronics Division. Cameron holds a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan. He also holds an MBA degree from the New York University Stern School of Business.
Brooks has been issued 6 U.S. patents and has authored over 20 technical papers. He is married, a father to two girls, and lives in Westchester County, NY.
Oguz Capan
ROC Enerji
web site
Oguz Capan is the founder, CEO, and chief inventor of ROC Enerji. Prior to founding ROC Enerji he worked as a consultant and an entrepreneur in the oil industry and has extensive knowledge of this sector. As a former oilman himself, he has studied and recognized the problems with the sector and decided to focus on alternatives to petroleum. He formed ROC Enerji with a focus on solar thermal energy. Capan studied the existing solar thermal technologies and worked on optimizing and solving these problems, patenting new ideas and designs. In addition to his solar thermal technologies he has won the 2006 World Bank/Bill Gates Foundation Development Marketplace contest for his low temperature desalinization & water purification process, which he has patented.
Andrew Dasinger
UTC Power
web site
Andrew Dasinger is presently sustainable strategies leader for UTC Power, a United Technologies Corp. (UTC) company. In this position, he supports UTC's co-chair role on the Energy Efficiency in Buildings project of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, which is developing a roadmap for achieving drastic reductions in energy consumption by commercial and residential buildings across the globe.
Since 1996, he has worked for UTC in a variety of technical and marketing management positions in the environmental and energy fields at Sikorsky Aircraft, UTC corporate headquarters, United Technologies Research Center, and UTC Power. Prior to joining UTC, Mr. Dasinger managed environmental projects at several engineering consulting firms.
A licensed professional engineer, Dasinger completed his undergraduate studies at Cornell University in Civil Engineering, received his MS in Civil Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was awarded an MBA from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University.
Bryan Magnus
Honeywell Specialty Materials
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Bryan Magnus is a global marketing manager for Honeywell Specialty Materials in the business unit that manufactures and markets blowing agents that are used in spray foam insulation for homes, buildings and appliances. In this role his responsibilities include leading the strategic development processes and driving business development efforts to grow the business into new areas such as the commercialization of new Low Global Warming alternatives. Magnus also sits on Honeywell's Corporate Energy, Environment and Sustainability committee where he helps provide guidance to senior leadership. Bryan's previous positions with Honeywell include strategic marketing analyst for Transportation Systems and senior analyst for Honeywell's Corporate Strategy Team.
Magnus holds an MBA from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and an MS in Environmental Policy from the School of Natural Resources at the University of Michigan. He is an alumnus of the Fredrick A. and Barbara M. Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise and currently serves on the Environmental Advisory Committee in his home town of Maplewood, New Jersey.
Kyung-Ah Park
Goldman, Sachs & Co.
web site
Kyung-Ah Park is vice president in the Environmental Strategy Group at Goldman, Sachs & Co. and is responsible for supporting the implementation of the firm's environmental policy and its business commitments. In this capacity, she coordinates all environmental initiatives across the firm and also helps manage the Center for Environmental Markets, which provides research grants and partners with nongovernmental organizations to further market-based solutions to environmental challenges.
She joined Goldman Sachs in 1998 in the Mergers & Acquisitions Department in New York and also spent several years in the Advisory Group in Hong Kong. Most recently, she was vice president in the Industrials Group in the Investment Banking Division.
Prior to Goldman Sachs, she was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. She received an MBA from Harvard Business School and BA from Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea.
Juan Luis Peña
CINVESTAV
web site
Juan Luis Peña Chapa is a researcher from the Research and Advanced Studies Center of the National Polytechnic Institute (CINVESTAV) in Mérida, Mexico, where he leads the New Materials group. He graduated from the Autonomous University of Nuevo Leon. Peña did his PhD at CINVESTAV in Mexico City. Peña collaborates with researchers at the University of Parma, Italy; the University of Barcelona and the Autonomous University in Madrid, Spain; the National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA; the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and the Autonomous University Yucatan and of Nuevo Leon.
He was president of the CINVESTAV, Mérida campus from 1988 to 2006, and in 1999 he founded and managed the Applied Science and Advanced Technology Research Center at IPN. Currently, Peña's research is focused on thin films for solar cells.
Paul Waide, PhD
International Energy Agency
web site
Paul Waide is a senior policy analyst in the Energy Efficiency and Environment Division of the International Energy Agency where he has a prominent role in the agency's work on energy efficiency, which includes supporting the G8 countries in developing their plan of action addressing Climate Change, Clean Energy, and Sustainable Development. He provides analysis for the agency's influential long-range energy scenarios including the World Energy Outlook and Energy Technologies Perspectives publications and is also the principal author of some of the agency's main publications addressing energy efficiency policy and technology including Light's Labour's Lost: Policies for Energy Efficient Lighting and Cool Appliances: Policy Strategies for Energy-Efficient Homes. Many of the recommendations deriving from these analyses have been adopted by government and in particular sixteen concrete energy-efficiency policy recommendations made by the IEA have been endorsed by the G8 and IEA Energy Ministers.
Prior to joining the IEA he worked as an international energy efficiency consultant for 14 years wherein he was involved in the promulgation of equipment energy efficiency programmes (especially those concerned with standards and labelling) in Europe, China, South Africa, and numerous other countries. Waide is on the board of two energy efficiency NGOs (CLASP and IMT) and has a PhD in applied energy from Cranfield University in the UK.
Innovation Models
Enrique Dussel Peters, PhD
National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)
web site
Enrique Dussel Peters is a professor of economics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He has taught more than 90 courses at the BA, MA, and PhD level in Mexico and internationally, and participated in more than 260 national and international seminars and conferences. His research has concentrated on theory of industrial organization, economic development, and political economy, as well as on the manufacturing sector, trade, and regional specialization patterns in Latin America and Mexico. He has collaborated with and coordinated projects with UNAM, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), the International Labor Organization (ILO), the Ford Foundation, and the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB), among other institutions. He received several research distinctions in 2000 and 2004.
Dussel Peters completed his BA and MA studies in political science at the Free University of Berlin and received a PhD in economics at the University of Notre Dame.
Alan Paau, PhD
Cornell University
web site
Alan Paau is responsible for the strategic management of all technologies and intellectual property that arise from the research activities at Cornell University. From 1998 to 2007, Paau was assistant vice chancellor and director for technology transfer at the University of California, San Diego. Previously, he was executive director of the Iowa State University Research Foundation and associate director of the Biotechnology Center at the Ohio State University. Before returning to the academic environment, Paau held various research and management positions in the Cetus Corporation and the W.R. Grace & Co. organization for 12 years.
Paau holds a PhD in biological sciences and an MBA. He is the inventor of 8 U.S. patents and the author of 36 journal articles and book chapters. As a director of intellectual property and a certified licensing executive, he supervised the execution of over 950 licenses and option agreements and the formation of over 100 startup companies using innovations licensed from universities.
Karin Ezbiansky Pavese, PhD
New York Academy of Sciences
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Karin Ezbiansky Pavese currently serves as the director of Innovation & Sustainability Initiatives at the New York Academy of Sciences.
She received her PhD in inorganic chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. Subsequently, she joined the General Electric Company as part of a two-year Technical Leadership Program. There, Pavese led product and process development while completing management training. Upon graduation from General Electric's management program, she assumed a leadership role as a Six Sigma Black Belt directing research projects in the area of nanoparticle-filled coatings where her most recent focus was on optical media. She played a major technical role in the launch of a limited play DVD product named ez-D (FlexPlay Technologies).
Pavese left General Electric in 2004 to serve as a congressional fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), sponsored by the Optical Society of America (OSA) and the Materials Research Society (MRS). Selected by U.S. Senator Joseph I. Lieberman (CT), she played a key role in developing a landmark piece of legislation that addressed American competitiveness and innovation in science and technology.
Pavese is currently a member of the New York University Science Advisory Board, the chair of the Grassroots Committee for the Materials Research Society's Government Affairs, and most recently elected to a director-at-large position of the American Chemical Society's New York Section.
Steven Popper, PhD
RAND
web site
Steven Popper is a RAND senior economist and professor of science and technology policy at the RAND Graduate School. From 1996 to 2001 he was the associate director of RAND's Science and Technology Policy Institute (S&TPI). His S&TPI work provided research and analytic support to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and other agencies of the executive branch.
Popper is currently leading a project on science- and technology-based economic development for Mexico City. He also has projects on energy policy and has done research in the field of energy security. He is active in projects of the RAND Pardee Center for Longer-Range Global Policy and the Future Human Condition. He was coauthor of the flagship study, Shaping the Next Hundred Years, which provides a new methodological framework for considering problems raised by future uncertainty. His current Pardee Center work is on emerging infectious disease, human development, and social security.
Popper has conducted research and has served as consultant to several governments as well as multilateral international organizations such as OECD on issues of regional economic development, industrial restructuring, and technology planning. He led RAND's first Summer Institute, a week-long workshop on science, technology, and U.S. economic competitiveness. Prior to joining RAND, he worked as a researcher in physical chemistry and enzymology, as country account officer for Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia at Bank of America, and as consultant to the World Bank on issues of industrial restructuring in East Europe.
Julio A. de Quesada
Executive Council of Global Companies (CEEG)
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Julio de Quesada has been president of the Executive Council of Global Companies since its foundation in 2004. This business organization includes 36 international companies, all leaders in their sectors and committed to Mexico. The organization has attracted new investment projects representing 38% of Mexico's foreign direct investments. Their annual sales contribute 10.5% of the Mexican GDP and they create more than 500,000 direct and 1.5 million indirect jobs.
De Quesada was appointed CEO of Grupo Financiero Citibank (Holding Company for all Citigroup's legal vehicles in Mexico) and Citibank, S.A. (its banking subsidiary in Mexico) in March 1994. He headed the company's Mexico businesses until November 1991 when Citigroup purchased Grupo Financiero Banamex. De Quesada formed part of the leadership team that integrated the operations of both banks. After the integration, Citi asked him to stay on and head up the combined Corporate and Investment Banking businesses of Banamex and Citibank in Mexico. In August 2006, he was given additional responsibilities heading up Banamex's Treasury operations, the largest in the Mexican financial system, and was appointed CEO of the Banamex Financial Group Corporate and Investment Bank and Treasury businesses.
De Quesada was born in Cuba and is a naturalized U.S. citizen. He holds an MBA in finance from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a BS in engineering from Brown University.
Sylvia Schwaag Serger, PhD
Swedish Government Agency for Innovation Systems (VINNOVA)
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Sylvia Schwaag Serger serves as director of international collaboration and networks at the Swedish Government Agency for Innovation Systems (VINNOVA) and is a senior research fellow at the Research Policy Institute at the University of Lund.
From 2005 to 2007, Schwaag Serger was Swedish science counsellor in Beijing. She has published several papers on China's economic and scientific development, advises Swedish ministries and agencies on China-related issues, and has been commissioned by the European Commission as a China expert in several projects. During these two years, she was the Swedish national expert in the OECD for a project focused on China's innovation system.
From 1992 to 2002, Schwaag Serger was a senior researcher at the Swedish Institute for Food and Agricultural Economics (SLI), analyzing decision-making in the European Union. From 1997 to 1999, she worked at the Ministry of Industry and Trade in Stockholm on innovation policy. She was also an expert on a Swedish governmental committee on the European Monetary Union (EMU). Schwaag Serger holds a PhD in economic history from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a Master's in International Relations from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University (SAIS).
Michael Standing
Monitor Group
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Mike Standing is a partner at Monitor Group in London and leads one of its 10 core consulting operating units. He works with major organizations undergoing fundamental transformation. His clients include governments and pharmaceutical, healthcare, and not-for-profit institutions. He has special interest in public policy development. Standing is leading Monitor's current efforts to support New Profit's collaboration with an Irish foundation piloting venture philanthropy efforts.
José E. Villa Rivera, PhD
National Polytechnic Institute
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José Villa Rivera is president of the National Polytechnic Institute. Villa Rivera is a native of Sinaloa State in Mexico. He has a PhD in petroleum engineering from the French Institute of Petroleum. His studies in France, combined with several foreign stays, allowed him to develop a global vision for higher education, technological scientific activities, and innovation.
Among other awards, he is recipient of honorary degrees from the Autonomous University of Sinaloa and the Lyon INSA, Sinaloa's Model Citizen in the World award, the French Légion d'honneur award, and the 2004 Sinaloa Science and Technology award. He has been included in the Mexican Leaders journal as one of the 300 most influential leaders for three consecutive years.
Pipeline of Talent
Sergio M. Alcocer
National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)
web site
Sergio Alcocer is a civil engineer on the faculty at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He obtained his doctorate in engineering at the University of Texas, Austin. Since 1994 he has been a national researcher. He served as the director of the engineering institute at UNAM and director of research at the National Center for the Prevention of Disasters. Currently, he is the secretary general at UNAM and president of the committee that revises the Complementary Technical Norms construction regulations for the design and construction of masonry structures in Mexico City. He is a member of several technical committees of the American Institute of Concrete and a member of the Board of Directors. Alcocer was the president of the Mexican Society of Structural Engineering and president of the technical committee of the Organismo Nacional de Normalización y Certificación de la Construccion y Edificacion, S.C. He is also a member of the Engineering Academy, the Mexican Academy of Sciences (AMC), and an advisor for the ICA foundation.
In 2001, he received the distinguished award for his technical research from the AMC and from the National University for Young Academics in the areas of innovation technology and industrial design. In 2007, he received an award in structural engineering for housing from the Mexican Society of Structural Engineering.
Axel Didriksson, PhD
Secretary of Education, Mexico City
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Axel Didriksson Takayanagui, holds a bachelor's degree in sociology, a master's degree in Latin American studies, and a doctorate in economics. He was the director of the Centre for University Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), which became the Institute for Research on Universities and Education (IISUE). He is the coordinator-general of the Network of Public Macro-universities of Latin America and the Caribbean, and vice-president of the executive committee of the Union of Latin American Universities (UDUAL). He is a Level-2 member of the Mexican National System of Researchers. Since 1995, he has held the UNESCO Chair on Regional Integration and the University. He is a regular member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and has been an educational researcher for 30 years. He has written 10 books, the most recent being The University in the Knowledge Society, published by UNESCO Mexico in 2006, and coauthored 30 books.
Juan Alberto González
Microsoft Mexico
web site
As general director, Juan Alberto González is responsible for the operations of Microsoft Mexico, an organization with more than 500 employees. Additionally, González manages the social responsibility initiative, where Microsoft Mexico has one of the best practices worldwide.
Before joining Microsoft Mexico, González was general director of the Andean region, including Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. In this particular region, he oversaw a growth of 70% in a three-year period. Before becoming general director of the Andean region, González was director at the subsidiaries in Colombia for two years, and later in Peru for another three years. During this time he achieved a 20% increase in profitability. He managed the negotiations for a master plan of cooperation between Microsoft and the Peruvian government.
Due to his great passion for social responsibility, in 2000 González founded the Microsoft Solidario program, which engages employees and their families in social responsibility efforts in Colombia. González is one of the few young leaders to receive several awards, such as Best Sales in Latin America in 2005, and in 2006 an award for the best subsidiary.
Joseph J. Helble, PhD
Dartmouth College
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Joseph J. Helble is professor of engineering and the 12th Dean of the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College. Prior to joining Dartmouth in 2005, Helble was the Roger Revelle Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), enabling him to spend a year addressing technology policy in the office of U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman.
Previously, Helble was chair of Chemical Engineering at the University of Connecticut, with research in the areas of energy, air pollution, and nanoscale materials. Earlier he was employed as a research scientist at Physical Sciences in Andover, MA, specializing in energy technology development. In 1993, he also worked at U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters in Washington DC as a AAAS science and policy fellow.
Helble has served on several EPA Science Advisory Board panels, and is presently on the editorial boards of two scientific journals and a member of the Board of Advisors of the University of Vermont College of Engineering. He is the author of over 100 research publications and 3 U.S. patents, a recipient of a young faculty Career Award from NSF, an outstanding young faculty award from the University of Connecticut School of Engineering, and the university's inaugural environmental faculty leadership award.
Helble received his PhD in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Julio G. Mendoza, PhD
CINVESTAV
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Julio Mendoza obtained his PhD in physics from the State University of Campinas in Sao Paulo Brazil. He is a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and has been a member of the National Investigators since 1984. He is also a member of the Mexican Society of Physics, the American Physical Society, and many other academies and societies.
Mendoza is chairman of the Scientific Society of CINVESTAV, was research and planning coordinator of the National Polytechnic Institute from 1999 to 2000, a member of the review committee for physical sciences at Conayct from 1999 to 2002, and a visiting professor at the Semiconductor Laboratory of CETUC at Pontificia Universidade Católica in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He has published over 130 papers.
Juan Manuel Romero
Pearson Education Latin America
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Juan Manuel Romero has been president and CEO of Pearson Education Latin America since 2005. He is responsible for 850 employees in over 20 countries, generating $150 million in revenues. Pearson Education's products and services in Latin America reach over 10 million students every year in three primary markets: primary/secondary school, English as a Second Language, and Higher Education. Pearson's offerings include textbooks, educational software, online distance learning, instructor professional development, online products, and various educational services.
Prior to joining Pearson Education Latin America, Romero ran the Regulatory Division of Thomson Brazil (IOB) and was responsible for developing Primedia's business in Latin America. In addition to his extensive experience in Latin America, Romero has a strong track record in marketing, finance, strategy, and general management. He earned his BA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and his MBA from Columbia University.
Carl Johan Sundberg, MD, PhD
Karolinska Institute
web site | publications
Carl Johan Sundberg is a senior university lecturer in bioentrepreneurship at the Karolinska Institute and heads the Unit for Bioentrepreneurship where research and education in entrepreneurship and innovation for students, researchers, and clinicians are conducted. He works half-time as investment manager in a biotech VC fund and is also a licensed physician and associate professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, where his research group focuses on physical activity and the molecular mechanisms of angiogenesis and mitochondrial biogenesis in human skeletal muscle.
Sundberg is programme director for a Master Programme in Bioentrepreneurship and course director for courses such as From Science to Business, Medicine for Journalists, and Popular Science Communication for medical and PhD students. He has received the Karolinska Institutet Prize for Teaching Excellence, a Certificate of Commendation for Communication in the Life Sciences from EMBO, Ångpanneföreningen's Prize for Research Communication, and the European Commission's Descartes Communication Prize for Excellence in Science Communication 2005. He is vice-president of Euroscience and was the founder of Euroscience Open Forum, a large international science conference on science, technology, business, and science communication. Sundberg has served as member or chairman on numerous company and academic boards, including NsGene A/S and Alfta Rehab AB.
Technology to Marketplace
René Asomoza, PhD
CINVESTAV
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René Asomoza is the president of the Center for Investigations and Advanced Studies (CINVESTAV) at the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN). He received a doctorate in solid state physics from the Paris University XI in Orsay, France, and a second doctorate in physics from the same university. He became an assistant professor on the science faculty at Paris University. Since 1984, when the National System of Researchers was created, he has been a member and in 1996 he became a level 3 member. Currently he serves as professor "D" in the Electrical Engineering Department at CINVESTAV, where he also held titles such as academic coordinator and section supervisor in the department.
He has published approximately 92 articles in international magazines and others. He has taught courses at the postgraduate level at the Physics and Mathematics School at the IPN and in the Technological Institute of Tokyo. He has participated in several Mexican science societies and has been a member of several evaluation committees, qualifying juries, and commissions.
René Bastón, MA
New York Academy of Sciences
web site
René Bastón has extensive contacts and broad experience in both academia and industry. As the chief business officer at the New York Academy of Sciences, he has created alliances in the U.S. and internationally with leading universities, governments, and multinational corporations in pharmaceuticals, biotech, real estate, venture capital, IT, electronics, consumer goods and other areas related to life sciences, physical sciences and engineering. During the four years of René's tenure, business development revenues have increased 250%. René also initiated and helps lead the Academy's annual Strategic Planning exercises and created and leads its Science & Technology Innovation and Economic Development advisory practice.
Prior to joining the NYAS, Bastón was an associate director at Columbia University's Science & Technology Ventures, where he was responsible for identifying promising emerging technologies, protecting the intellectual property, and negotiating licenses and research collaborations with established or startup companies in the areas of biotechnology, biomedical informatics, medical imaging, and nanobiotechnology.
Bastón was also the cofounder, vice president of Business Development, and acting CTO of Medihub, a New York based provider of software and consulting services to the medical industry. Bastón founded Medihub after spending several years in the technology enablement and business transformation divisions of Ernst & Young's Healthcare Consulting Group where he was one of the founding members of the E&Y e-Health Incubator Team.
Before making the transition to industry, René received a graduate degree from the Medical Informatics Program at Columbia University, where he performed research on the application and development of controlled medical vocabularies. He also spent several years performing neurobiology research in the laboratory of Nobel laureate Eric Kandel at the Columbia University Center for Neurobiology and Behavior.
René is a member of the Board of Advisors for the Columbia University Center for Advanced Technology and holds a black belt in Tae Kwon Do.
William B. Bonvillian
web site
William Bonvillian has been director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Washington, DC, office since January 2006. Prior to that position, he served for 17 years as legislative director and chief counsel to U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman. He has taught science and technology policy and innovation issues at Georgetown, MIT, and George Washington universities. He serves on the Board on Science Education of the National Academies of Sciences and was the recipient of the IEEE Distinguished Public Service Award in 2007.
His recent articles include, "Power Play — The DARPA Model and U.S. Energy Policy" (2006) in American Interest; "The Politics of Jobs" (2007), "Meeting the New Challenge to U.S. Economic Competitiveness" (2004) and "Organizing Science and Technology for Homeland Security" (with K.V. Sharp, 2002), all published in Issues in Science and Technology; "Will the Search for New Energy Technologies Require a New R&D Mission Agency?" (2007) in Bridges; and "Science at a Crossroads" (2002), published in Technology in Society and reprinted in the FASEB Journal.
Early in his career, he served as the deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Transportation. He received a BA from Columbia University with honors, an MAR from Yale; and a JD from Columbia Law School, where he served on the Columbia Law Review. Following law school, he served as a law clerk to a federal judge in New York.
Rafael Funes
DynaWare
web site
Rafael Funes is general manager at DynaWare and chair of the board of directors for the Mexican Association of the Information Technology Industry. He is an industrial engineer and systems engineer on the Monterrey campus of Mexico State. In 1985 he began software development by building his own database driver, an electroencephalogram analysis and cerebral mapping system, and other diverse operative, administrative, financial, and accounting applications.
In 1996 he completed the first version of DynaWare, the first Integral Business Information System created in Mexico that was considered by global analysts to be among the best in the world. On December 2003, through INDAUTOR and with OMPI's consent, the secretary of public education awarded him with the National Merit of Honor for Authors for developing DynaWare. In 2006 he received the Science and Technology State award from Enrique Peña Nieto, governor of the state of Mexico.
His lectures, as well as his contributions on information technology to the Mexican media and abroad, have turned him into a well renowned opinion leader. He is an advisor to the Center for the Development of Information Technology and Electronics (CEDETIE) for the Monterrey Technological Campus and a member of the advisory council of Emprende Mexico.
He participated on the committee that supervised the preparation of the Vision 2020 document "For the Mexico that we all want," which was developed by AMITI and CANIETI, as well as the "Mexico Vision 2030" plan.
Maria G. Gotsch
New York City Investment Fund
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Maria Gotsch is president and chief executive officer of the New York City Investment Fund. The Fund has built a network of top experts from the investment and corporate communities who help identify and support New York City's most promising entrepreneurs in both the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors. It also provides financing for projects that contribute to the economic renewal of blighted areas and alleviation of poverty. The Fund is the vision of Henry R. Kravis, founding partner of Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Co., who serves as its founding chairman. Russell L. Carson, general partner of Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, and Richard M. Cashin, managing partner of One Equity Partners, serve as the Fund's co-chairmen.
Prior to joining the Fund in 1999, Gotsch was a managing director at BT Wolfensohn (now part of Deutsche Bank), providing strategic and financial advice related to mergers, acquisitions, dispositions, joint ventures and the development of business strategies. Before starting with Wolfensohn, Gotsch worked at LaSalle Partners in the New York area and for Merrill Lynch Capital Markets in New York and London. Maria has an MBA from Harvard Business School. She was also the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to study international relations at the Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales in Geneva, Switzerland.
William Haseltine, PhD
Haseltine Associates, Ltd.
William Haseltine is chairman and CEO of Haseltine Associates, Ltd. and president of the William A. Haseltine Foundation for Medical Sciences and the Arts. He is a professor at the Scripps Research Institute and sits on the board for the Institute for One World Health. In 1992, he founded Human Genome Sciences, serving as its chairman and CEO until October 2004. A Harvard University faculty member from 1976–1993, he created and served as chair of two academic departments—the Division of Cancer Pharmacology and the Division of Human Retrovirology—at Harvard's Dana Farber Cancer Institute. Haseltine founded The Journal of AIDS Research and Retrovirology and The Journal of Regenerative Medicine. He has received numerous awards and honors for his research on cancer, AIDS, and biotechnology. His business career includes establishing seven biotechnology companies—among them, Dendreon, Diversa, and Human Genome Sciences—and participating in the formation of another 20, including Medimmune, as a Healthcare Ventures advisor. Active in the scientific and public policy communities, he sits on numerous boards. Haseltine did graduate and postgraduate work with Nobel laureates James Watson, Walter Gilbert, and David Baltimore. He earned his PhD in biophysics from Harvard University.
Steve Hochberg
Ascent Biomedical Ventures
web site
Steve Hochberg has been an active founder and investor in early-stage medical technology companies since 1992. Companies cofounded by Steve include Biomerix Corporation, Eminent Research Systems Inc. (acquired by PPD, Inc. in 2003), Clinsights, Inc. (acquired by PPD, Inc. in 2003), Med-E-Systems/AHT Corporation (initial public offering in 1996), and Physicians' Online (acquired by Mediconsult in 1999). Steve currently serves on the Board of Directors of Biomerix Corporation, Synecor, LLC, Crosstrees Medical, Inc., and Ouroboros. Steve is member of the board of governors of the New York Academy of Sciences. Steve is also a member of the board of trustees and executive committee and chairman of the Finance Committee of Continuum Health Partners, one of the largest nonprofit hospital systems in New York City.
Earlier in his career, Hochberg was an investment banker with Alex Brown & Sons and a strategy consultant with Bain & Company in the technology and healthcare areas. Steve holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Carlos Martínez Vela, PhD
MIT
web site
Carlos Martínez Vela is a postdoctoral fellow in the Industrial Performance Center (IPC) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Martínez Vela holds a BS in engineering physics from the Monterrey Institute of Technology (Mexico) and a MS in technology policy from MIT, where he also has been a Martin Fellow for Sustainability. He obtained his PhD in technology, management, and policy from MIT in February 2007. Martínez Vela is a specialist in innovation policy and the role of universities in creating improved conditions for industrial innovation and regional economic development.
At the IPC he was a founding member of the Local Innovation Systems project and served as director of the international conference on universities, innovation, and the competitiveness of local economies. In his most recent research, he examined the role of universities in the emergence of the energy technology industry in Eastern Massachusetts. He became a John Adams Fellow at the Innovation Institute at MIT in October 2007. In that role, he assists the John Adams Innovation Institute, the economic development arm of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, in policy design and project evaluation for innovation and economic development. He is a native of Monterrey, Mexico.
Dennis Purcell
Aisling Capital
web site
Dennis Purcell is senior managing director of Aisling Capital. He previously served as managing director of the Life Sciences Investment Banking Group at Chase H&Q (formerly Hambrecht & Quist) and served on the executive committee of Hambrecht & Quist. He was directly involved with over 200 completed transactions and supervised over $10 billion of financing and advisory assignments in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical products industries. During his tenure, BioWorld and other industry publications cited H&Q as the leading underwriter of life sciences securities. He was honored in the "Biotech Hall of Fame" by Genetic Engineering News and named to the "Biotechnology All-Stars" list by Forbes ASAP. Purcell also currently serves as a director of Auxilium Pharmaceuticals, Bridge Pharmaceuticals, Dynova Laboratories, and Xanodyne Pharmaceuticals. He peviously served as a director of Aton Pharmaceuticals, Cengent Therapeutics, and Valentis. He is also a member of the board of directors of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO)-Emerging Companies Section. He has served as a member of the advisory council at Harvard Medical School. Purcell received his MBA from Harvard University.
Eduardo Solórzano
Wal-mart of Mexico, SA
web site
Eduardo Solórzano has been president and chief executive officer of Wal-Mart of Mexico SA, a subsidiary of Wal-mart Stores Inc. since February 25, 2004. Prior to that, Solórzano served as chief operating officer of Wal-Mart Mexico. Solórzano joined Cifra, the predecessor company to Wal-Mart Mexico in 1985. He worked in a variety of operations, merchandising and logistics areas and became chief operating officer in 2003. In 1994, he became commercial director for the Mexican retail firm Soriana. He rejoined Wal-Mart in 1998 and has been a director of Wal-Mart de Mexico S.A. since 2000. Solórzano has a degree in economics from the Instituto Tecnologico de Monterrey and a master's degree in economics from the Universidad de las Americas.
Roberto Tapia-Conyer, MD, MPH, MSc, DrSc
National University of Mexico (UNAM)
web site | publications
Roberto Tapia-Conyer is a senior professor and tutor of masters and doctorate in sciences at the National University of Mexico (UNAM), as well as a professor in the College of Health Science at the University of California, Irvine. Tapia-Conyer holds a MD from UNAM. He also holds both MSc and MPH degrees from Harvard University, as well as a doctorate in sciences conferred by the UNAM. As a scholar, Tapia-Conyer has published more than 180 research articles in national and international peer-reviewed medical journals, authored seven books on public health topics, and contributed chapters to close to 20 books.
Tapia-Conyer joined Mexico's Ministry of Health in 1982 where he has built his institutional career. In 1997 Tapia-Conyer was appointed vice minister of prevention and health promotion, a position which he held until December 2006. In this position he oversaw the design and development of innovative and effective public health policies and programs that continue to be employed by the current Mexican government.
Tapia-Conyer is an active member of the Mexican Academy Sciences, the Mexican Academy of Medicine, the Mexican Academy of Surgery, and the Mexican Public Health Society, where he served as president from 1997 to 1998. He is also a member-fellow of the National Researchers System-level III in Mexico's Council of Science and Technology. He was chairperson (2005–2008) of the Strategic Technical Advisory Group of WHO's TB Program and has been a member of the Technical Advisory Group for Vaccine Preventable Diseases of the Pan-American Health Organization since 1997. Tapia-Conyer was recently nominated by WHO's director-general to be a member of the Influenza Global Action Plan Advisory Group.
Since 2007, Roberto Tapia-Conyer has served as director-general of the Carso Health Institute. The Carso Health Institute is a nonprofit organization funded by the Carlos Slim Foundation that invests resources for the development of public and social projects in health and nutrition for Latin America and the Caribbean.
Student Track
Klaudia Brix, Dr. rer. nat.
Jacobs University Bremen
web site | publications
Klaudia Brix is a professor of cell biology at Jacobs University Bremen, Germany. Jacobs University Bremen is a highly selective, private institution for the advancement of education and research. Its academic programs and cultural environment prepare graduates for international leadership and global citizenship. Klaudia Brix is coordinator of the biochemistry and cell biology undergraduate program and representative of cellular and molecular biology in the graduate program of molecular life science at Jacobs University.
Klaudia Brix was trained as biologist receiving the Dr. rer. nat. from University of Bonn, Germany, in 1987. She was Lise-Meitner Fellow and received the Venia legendi in cell biology in 1997. She has been working in the field of molecular cell biology for over 20 years and has supervised 26 diploma students and 15 PhD students. Brix's research focuses on the biological significance of extracellular proteolysis, with a special emphasis on proteases in physiological functions of epithelial organs. She has published over 40 papers as book chapters and in peer-reviewed journals. She is on the editorial board of EJCB and serves as reviewer for a variety of international universities, scientific journals as well as for international foundations and research councils. She is a member of the American Society for Cell Biology, the British Society for Matrix Biology, the European Society of Endocrinology, and is vice-president of the International Proteolysis Society.
Sarah Caddick, PhD
Gatsby Charitable Foundation
web site
Sarah Caddick received her doctorate in neuroscience in 1993 from the University of Southhampton in the United Kingdom. After working in research at the Medical College of Virginia and Duke University Medical Center she left the lab to pursue the business of science.
Leaving the bench, she started a career in the nonprofit sector involving a range of experiences from scientific grant management to nonprofit start-up. Early positions she held were as director of award programs for the Cancer Research Fund of the Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Foundation and director of medical and scientific programs for the Steven and Michele Kirsch Foundation.
In 2003 she became executive director of the Wadsworth Foundation before joining FasterCures, The Center for Accelerating Medical Solutions, as executive vice president / chief scientific officer.
In 2005 she was hired by renowned neurobiologist Thomas Jessell to be executive director of Columbia University's Center for Neuroscience Initiatives (CNI), a position she held until April 2007. In May 2007, she became principal advisor to Lord Sainsbury of Turville and his efforts through the Gatsby Charitable Foundation in supporting world-class experimental and computational research in neuroscience.
Juan Carlos López, PhD
Nature Medicine
web site
Juan Carlos López was born in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 1967. He obtained his first degree in biomedical research at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, majoring in neuroscience. Juan Carlos got his PhD from Columbia University (New York), studying synaptic plasticity in neuronal cultures. He then carried out postdoctoral work at the Instituto Cajal (Madrid), studying presynaptic mechanisms of transmitter release. During this period, Juan Carlos wrote a book on the neurobiology of memory (El Telar de la Memoria, Algar Editorial), for which he won the IV European Scientific Dissemination Award in 1998. Two years later, Juan Carlos left experimental research to become editor of Nature Reviews Neuroscience in London. In January 2004, he returned to New York to become the chief editor of Nature Medicine.
Erick Stephens
Office of National Technology, Microsoft Mexico; ITAM
As national technology officer, Erick Stephens is responsible for advancing Microsoft's technology policy agenda with governments and academic elites in Mexico. Erick focuses on the following key areas of technology policy: security, privacy, economic development, interoperability and open standards, as well as technical computing. He is a federal, state, and local ITC and innovation consultant, e-government, education, and security policy analyst, and spokesman for Digital Policy magazine at NEXOS Group.
Stephens is coauthor of "The Citizen Service Matrix," in The Authority: The Citizen, a book published by the Committee of Informatics, State, and Municipal Civil Service, AC (CIAPEM) in 2008. He has a degree in computer engineering and an MBA from the Mexican Autonomous Institute of Technology (ITAM). Stephens teaches at ITAM, where he received a Professional Excellence Award in 2007.
Alan Dove
Alan Dove is a science writer and reporter for Nature Medicine, Nature Biotechnology, and Bioscience Technology. He also teaches at the NYU School of Journalism, and blogs at http://dovdox.com.
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