Some local luminaries are making good on the national stage.
First there’s Dr. Paula Johnson, who was one of five physicians named to the National Institutes of Health’s Advisory Committee on Research on Women’s Health. Johnson is the executive director of the Connors Center for Women’s Health and Gender Biology and chief of the Women’s Health division at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Then there’s President Barack Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which will be co-chaired by John Holdren (already in Washington serving as assistant to the president for science and technology and as director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy) and MIT’s Eric Lander.
Before he moved to the Beltway, Holdren was a professor of environmental policy and director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, professor of environmental science and policy in Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and director of the Woods Hole Research Center.
Lander, who was one of the minds behind the Human Genome Project, is director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and a biology professor at MIT, professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School and a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.
Three others with Boston connections were named to the council:
— Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and former chairwoman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, was the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate from MIT. She is also chairwoman of the New York Stock Exchange’s Regulation Board.
— Ernest Moniz is director of the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment, professor of physics and engineering systems and director of the Energy Initiative, all at MIT.
— Daniel Schrag is the Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology in Harvard’s Earth and Planetary Sciences department and director of the school’s Center for Environment.
