Keynote Speakers
Bruce D Walker, M.D. (Harvard)
Dr. Walker is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Partners AIDSResearch Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is internationally recognized for his effort in finding new ways to fight HIV. Since 1988, he has been leading an international research effort to understand how some rare people who are infected with HIV but have never been treated can fight the virus with their immune system, in hopes of leading to a vaccine or new treatment. While working in Africa, he also realized the need to improve patient care in the underdeveloped countries, so he has spearheaded the creation of advanced clinical and laboratory facilities in South Africa, the front lines of the AIDS epidemic. In addition to being a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator (HHMI), he directs the Partners AIDS Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, a research, education, and training program that aims to enhance clinical care of HIV-infected persons internationally and to develop new ways to fight HIV. Source: Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Harvard Hughes Medical Institute Site
Harvard Medical School PageRobert S. Langer (MIT)
Dr. Langer currently serves as one of the 14 Institute Professors (the highest honor awarded to a faculty member) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His lab conducts research on drug delivery, tissue engineering, stem cell research, biomaterial synthesis, and angiogenesis inhibition. Time Magazine and CNN (2001) named Dr. Langer as one of the 100 most important people in America and one of the 18 top people in science or medicine in America (America's Best). Forbes Magazine (2002) selected Dr. Langer as one of the 15 innovators world wide who will reinvent our future. Dr. Langer's patents have been licensed or sublicensed to over 200 pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology and medical device companies. He is the most cited engineer in history. He has served as a member of the United States Food and Drug Administration's SCIENCE Board, the FDA's highest advisory board, from 1995 to 2002, and as its Chairman from 1999-2002. Dr. Langer has received over 160 major awards, including the Charles Stark Draper Prize in 2002, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for engineers.
Source: MIT Department of EngineeringRecent article in Nature
Langer Lab/Biography
Daniel P. Schrag (Harvard)
The professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Director of the Laboratory for Geochemical Oceanography at Harvard studies climate and climate change over the broadest range of Earth history, with particular attention to El Nino and the tropical Pacific. He has helped develop the Snowball Earth hypothesis with his fellow Harvard colleague, Paul F. Hoffman. Besides claiming membership from several scientific societies (American Geophysical Union, American Academy for the Advancement of Science, and others), Dr Schrag has won numerous awards, including MacArthur Fellow (2000) and Technology Review TR100 - 100 young innovators for the next century (1999). Currently, Dr. Schrag is an advocate of a large scale effort to prepare the world to capture carbon dioxide from large point sources and store the CO2 in various geologic repositories.
