An Important Addition to the Academy Team

Michael Goldrich brings four decades of experience to the positions of executive vice president and chief operating officer.

My columns are usually devoted to one of the innovative global initiatives your Academy has recently launched—in science education, nutrition science, Alzheimer's disease, "smart communities," innovation and sustainability, open innovation challenges for the developing world, and so on. In these columns, I hope I have conveyed the fact that these extraordinary projects succeed only due to the support of our remarkable Board of Governors, President's Council, unprecedented network of experts and renowned academic, industry, government, and philanthropic partners, as well as our valued members.

But coordinating the efforts of this complex ecosystem is our terrific staff. What makes them exceptional is the breadth of their experience, something you may only know if you have happened to interact with them. The entire senior staff and many of the junior team have had multi-sector career positions before coming to the Academy. Nearly all began at elite research universities, but they then moved through industry, government, scientific publishing, and/or philanthropic positions before coming to 7 World Trade Center. (Their bios on our website express this point most powerfully, and if you haven't perused them, I recommend a quick look.)

Anyone who has worked with Mike during his fourdecade career will tell you that the Academy has enticed a game-changer to join our family.

This brings me to the introduction of a very special, brand new member of the team. On May 29, Michael Goldrich assumed the enormous responsibilities inherent in the positions of Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. Anyone who has worked with Mike during his four-decade career will tell you that the Academy has enticed a game-changer to join our family. Just consider the degree of difficulty of his previous positions...

Mike comes to us from the International Partnership for Microbicides (IPM), where he has been EVP, COO, and CFO since 2009. At IPM, he helped the CEO, Dr. Zeda Rosenberg, in her worthy quest to provide even the poorest women with an affordable, self-initiated HIV prevention strategy. An operation spending more than $40 million a year on novel research approaches on this challenge, IPM depends on a global public/private partnership (PPP) of US and European donor agencies, the Gates and other foundations, corporations, and academic researchers. Herding such a collection of powerful cats will be great training for what Mike will encounter at our Academy. But that only scratches the surface of Mike's career.

Before IPM, Mike spent six years as EVP & COO under our esteemed Governor, Dr. Seth Berkley. Before moving last year to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization in Geneva, Seth created the model for global PPPs when he founded the International AIDS Vaccines Initiative (IAVI) back in the early '90s. As IAVI grew and encountered unprecedented challenges, Mike helped Seth in innumerable ways. Perhaps his most significant challenge was launching the first NGO-directed in-house research laboratory at New York's Brooklyn Navy Yard. The experience of directly overseeing research will be crucial if the Academy's partners in nutrition science and Alzheimer's disease ask us not merely to lead in the creation of roadmaps to advance their fields but in overseeing actual precompetitive research in order to overturn failing paradigms in these areas.

Finally, I will add that, in earlier periods of his career, Mike was VP for Research Operations & Academic Affairs at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston; founding COO of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland (under the famous AIDS researcher Dr. Robert Gallo), Deputy Director and COO at the NIH Clinical Center, and COO (for a dozen years) under the world-renowned leader of the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases of NIH, Dr. Tony Fauci. And before that, he was Administrative Director at the National Cancer Institute.

I trust that you will agree that Mike Goldrich promises to be not merely a seasoned and highly creative COO for the Academy but a game-changing partner to me as our Academy approaches its Third Century, empowered by its Board of Governors and remarkable public and private partners to execute a thrilling—sometimes bewildering and always challenging—set of unprecedented local and global initiatives.

Ellis Rubinstein
President & CEO