Science Advisory Board

The Science Advisory Board (SAB) is composed of distinguished scientists from academia and government, who meet biennially to advise on the research portfolio of the IGB and strategize synergy with our outreach and public science education portfolio.

Scott Edwards

Scott Edwards
Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Curator of Ornithology
Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University

Scott Edwards has been a pioneer in avian molecular phylogenetics, employing DNA sequencing and comparative genomics to explore the evolutionary and natural history of birds. He has helped to improve analytical methods that take full advantage of comprehensive sequence data to estimate phylogenetic relationships. Edwards was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and as a Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2009, and as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2015. He has served as President of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the Society of Systematic Biologists, and the American Genetic Association.

Conrad Gilliam

Conrad Gilliam
Dean for Research and Graduate Education
University of Chicago

Conrad Gilliam is the Marjorie I. and Bernard A. Mitchell Professor in the Department of Human Genetics, as well as the Dean for Research and Graduate Education in the Biological Sciences Division at the University of Chicago. He came to the university in 2004 as Chair of Human Genetics. His research focuses on identifying and characterizing heritable mutations affecting the nervous system, from genetic mapping of rare disease mutations to the study of common heritable disorders.

Edison Liu

Edison Liu
Professor, President Emeritus, and Honorary Fellow
The Jackson Laboratory

Edison Liu is Professor, President Emeritus, and Honorary Fellow of The Jackson Laboratory, an independent, nonprofit research institution that studies how to prevent, treat and cure human disease through genetics. As the founding Executive Director of the Genome Institute of Singapore, he expanded the Institute’s staff from three to 270 in less than 10 years. Prior to that position, Liu was the scientific director of the National Cancer Institute's Division of Clinical Sciences. Liu is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Elaine Mardis

 

Elaine Mardis
Professor of Pediatrics
College of Medicine, Ohio State University

Elaine Mardis investigates cancer genomics, determining the pathways that may cause cancer development and developing precision therapeutic approaches. She served as Director of Technology Development at the McDonnell Genome Institute at Washington University and was also Professor in the Department of Genetics, with an adjunct appointment in the Department of Molecular Microbiology, and now serves as Professor of Pediatrics at the College of Medicine, Ohio State University. In 2010, she received the Scripps Translational Research Award for work on cancer genomics.

Kathie Olsen

 

Kathie Olsen
Founder and Managing Director
KLO International, LLC

Kathie Olsen is a former Deputy Director and COO at the National Science Foundation. Olsen has been awarded NASA’s Outstanding Leadership medal, the NSF Director’s Award of Excellence, and many others. She is currently Founder and Managing Director of KLO International, LLC, a consulting firm in Arlington, VA. In 2003, Olsen was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Aristides Patrinos

 

Aristides Patrinos
Chief Scientist & Director of Research
Novim

Aristides Patrinos was previously Deputy Director, Research, NYU Center For Urban Science & Progress and Director of the Office of Biological and Environmental Research in the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. He is well known for his leading roles in the development of the U.S. Global Change Research Program and the U.S. Human Genome Project. In addition, he helped create the Joint Genome Institute and developed and launched the Genomes to Life Program. In 2003, he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Barbara Schaal

 

Barbara Schaal
Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences
Washington University in St. Louis

Barbara Schaal was among the first plant scientists to use molecular biology-based approaches to understand evolutionary processes in plants, and has worked to advance understanding of plant molecular systematics and population genetics. Her recent work includes collaborative research into the evolutionary genetics of plants to enrich food crops such as cassava and rice. She was appointed to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in 2009 and in 2012, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1999. She is currently the Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences and Mary-Dell Chilton Distinguished Professor in the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Pamela Silver

Pamela Silver
Elliot T and Onie H Adams Professor of Biochemistry and Systems Biology
Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School

Pamela Silver is the Elliot T and Onie H Adams Professor of Biochemistry and Systems Biology in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. She is also a founding core faculty member of the Harvard University Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Her research combines lessons from Nature to the design of new organisms for both discovery and application, the most recent innovations including bacteria that can sense and respond to gut inflammation, and the Bionic Leaf which couples sunlight capture to bioproduction at an efficiency exceeding plants. She is a co-founder of Karyopharm Therapeutics.

Gregory Stephanopoulos

 

Gregory Stephanopoulos
Willard Henry Dow Professor in Chemical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Gregory Stephanopoulos leads research in biofuels and the production of chemicals and materials from renewable resources, to advance the concept of a biobased economy, as well as the analysis of metabolic networks to better understand human disease, including cancer. He is the Willard Henry Dow Professor in Chemical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and leads the Bioinformatics & Metabolic Engineering Laboratory at MIT. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, served in 2016 as President of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and in 2023 was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Paul Turner

 

Paul Turner
Rachel Carson Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Yale University

Paul Turner and his lab study evolutionary genetics and genomics of microbes, especially the ability of viruses to adapt to environmental changes, at all levels of biological organization –molecules, proteins, cells, populations, communities and ecosystems, and also study arthropod-borne viruses, specifically those vector-transmitted by mosquitoes. In 2019 Turner was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences.

Susan Wessler

 

Susan Wessler
Distinguished Professor of Genetics
University of California, Riverside

Susan Wessler is a molecular geneticist known for her contributions to the field of transposon biology, specifically on the roles of plant transposable elements in gene and genome evolution. Wessler is the Neil A and Rochelle A. Campbell Presidential Chair for Innovations in Science Education and Distinguished Professor of Genetics at the University of California, Riverside. In 2011, she was elected Home Secretary of the National Academy of Sciences, the first woman to hold this position in the 150-year history of the National Academy. She is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

James Weyhenmeyer

 

James Weyhenmeyer
Professor of Anatomy, Physiology and Pharmacology, College of Veterinary Medicine
Auburn University

James Weyhenmeyer was a Professor of Cell Biology, Neuroscience and Pathology at the University of Illinois, later Vice President for Research & Economic Development at Auburn University, where he provided leadership to a wide variety of research units, as well as serving as Professor of Anatomy/Physiology/Pharmacology in the College of Veterinary Medicine, of Chemical Engineering in the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, and of Biological Sciences in the College of Sciences and Mathematics. He is a member of several honorary societies, including the Royal Academy of Engineering Sciences.

Leadership Council

The Leadership Council (LC) is an advisory board to the IGB composed of prominent individuals from the business world who counsel the institute annually on efforts to encourage business development, commercialization and philanthropy in support of our community engagement goals.

Robert Easter

 

Robert Easter
President Emeritus, University of Illinois
Dean Emeritus, College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences
Professor Emeritus, Animal Sciences and Nutritional Sciences

Robert Easter joined the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty after earning his doctorate in animal science in 1976. He served as a department head, dean, interim provost, interim chancellor and interim vice chancellor for research at UIUC and was appointed as president in 2012. He was named president emeritus in 2015, is also an emeritus professor, and received an honorary doctorate from Iowa State University. Dr. Easter has investigated the amino acid needs of the lactating sow, the impact of post-weaning nutrition on growth composition to market and the use of various agents to alter lean growth in pigs. He has served as the Board for International Food and Agricultural Development (BIFAD) chair, received the Paul A. Funk Award for contributions to Illinois agriculture, the Charles B. Schuman Award for Distinguished Service to Agriculture by the Illinois Farm Bureau, and the University's Distinguished Service Medallion for unwavering devotion to the University.

Richard Foster

 

Richard Foster
Managing Partner
Millbrook Management Group LLC

Richard Foster is a director of, and investor in, digital healthcare, cyber security and food security companies. He is currently the Managing Partner of the Millbrook Management Group LLC. He is an Emeritus Director of McKinsey & Co., where he was a founder and leader of McKinsey’s Healthcare, Technology and Private Equity Practices. He is also Venture Partner at Lux Capital and Board Member of Memorial Sloan Kettering, the W. M. Keck Foundation and a member of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine Presidents’ Circle. His research interests are in long-term relationships between innovation, regulation and capital formation. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Peter Fox

 

Peter Fox
Founder and Chairman
Fox Development Corporation

Peter Fox founded Fox Development Corporation, a real estate development firm in Champaign. He serves as the Developer and Manager of Research Park at the University of Illinois, which is home to more than 90 companies. Previously, he served as the Senior Managing Director of Bear, Stearns & Companies, Inc., a global investment banking, securities trading and brokerage firm.

Robert Fraley

 

Robert Fraley
Former Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer
Monsanto

Robert Fraley oversaw Monsanto’s integrated crop and seed agribusiness technology and research as the Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. He began his career as a Senior Research Specialist in Monsanto’s Biological Sciences Program, later becoming President of Monsanto's former Ceregen business unit and Co-president of Monsanto’s Agricultural Sector. Fraley is an alumnus of the University of Illinois (PhD Microbiology, Biochemistry, 1978) and is a recipient of the World Food Prize.

Larry Gold

 

Larry Gold
Professor
University of Colorado Boulder

Larry Gold is a Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is also the Founder, Chairman and CEO of SomaLogic, a protein biomarker discovery and clinical diagnostics company. In addition, he founded NeXagen, Inc., which became NeXstar Pharmaceuticals and later merged with Gilead Sciences, Inc., a research-based biopharmaceutical company. In 1995, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Catherine Kleinmuntz

 

Catherine Kleinmuntz
Principal
Kleinmuntz Associates

Catherine Kleinmuntz is Principal at Kleinmuntz Associates, an analytics consultancy and investment firm, and is co-Executive Director of the Kleinmuntz Family Foundation, where she focuses on philanthropic endeavors. She has more than three decades of experience working in the healthcare business sector, with a primary focus on using information technology to improve financial processes in healthcare provider organizations. Kleinmuntz and her husband, Don Kleinmuntz, were cofounders of Strata Decision Technology, a leading provider of financial analytics software solutions for the healthcare industry; Kleinmuntz served as President and CEO until the company’s sale in 2011.

Don Kleinmuntz

 

Don Kleinmuntz
Principal
Kleinmuntz Associates

Don Kleinmuntz is Principal at Kleinmuntz Associates, an analytics consultancy and investment firm, co-Executive Director of the Kleinmuntz Family Foundation, a philanthropic foundation, and Adjunct Professor of Information Technology, Analytics, and Operations at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business. An expert on decision analysis and business analytics, he has made significant contributions in both academia and industry. Kleinmuntz and his wife, Catherine Kleinmuntz, were cofounders of Strata Decision Technology, a leading provider of financial analytics software solutions for the healthcare industry, and he held a variety of executive positions in the company including CFO, CIO, and interim CEO.

John Landgraf

 

John Landgraf
Former Executive Vice President
Abbott Nutrition

John Landgraf is the former Executive Vice President of Abbott Nutrition, where he oversaw two divisions and 16,000 employees during his 38-year career. He established an endowed fund to support students in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Northern Illinois University in activities ranging from undergraduate research, study abroad, service learning, internships, and teaching or clinical experiences, and serves on the boards for the Northeast Illinois Council — Boy Scouts of America, the Mailisita Foundation and Education Center, and Crealta Pharmaceuticals LLC.

Aaron Rudberg

 

Aaron Rudberg
Managing Director, COO
S2G Ventures/Builders Private Capital

Aaron Rudberg is Managing Director and COO of S2G Ventures/Builders Private Capital, the direct investment arm for Builder’s Vision. Aaron has worked in the investment business his entire professional career, and brings experience as an entrepreneur and institutional investor. Prior to joining S2G, Aaron spent 10 years at Baird Capital as a Partner and Managing Director overseeing the global strategy, investor relations, marketing and business development for the $3.5 billion private equity and venture capital business. Aaron received a BA from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Aaron is a member of the board of The Civic Federation, Adler Planetarium, and was named an Emerging Leader by the Chicago Council of Global Affairs in 2014.

Nancy Sullivan

 

Nancy Sullivan
CEO and Managing Director
Illinois Ventures

Nancy Sullivan has more than 15 years of experience in the commercialization and entrepreneurial sector. In her role at Illinois Ventures, she promotes the development and commercialization of emerging technologies based on University of Illinois research. Sullivan serves on the boards of two Chicago based startups, Personify and Diagnostic Photonics.

Steven Thayer

 

Steven Thayer
Partner
Handler Thayer, LLP

Mr. Thayer is a founding partner of Handler Thayer, LLP.  He currently serves as the Chairman of the firm’s Commercial Practice Group, which includes the firm’s Business & Corporate Practice, Real Estate Practice, and Sports & Entertainment Law Practice. Mr. Thayer has a diverse background and has represented individuals, businesses, and family offices in a variety of legal matters. Thayer is an alumnus of the University of Illinois (BA Economics, 1988), was awarded the 2018 Chicago Illini of the Year Award, and holds a membership in the University of Illinois Foundation’s President’s Council. He is a member of the American, Illinois State, Iowa State, and Chicago Bar Associations.

Kimberly Valentine-Poska

 

Kimberly Valentine-Poska
Principal
Global Capital Markets, Inc.

Kimberly is a visionary leader and qualified financial executive. She has over twenty-five years of global experience as an investment banker, entrepreneur, Partner for Deloitte, and board director. Known for successfully leading mergers & acquisitions, Kimberly provides integrative financial oversight for middle-market & Fortune 500 corporations. She has an established reputation for effectively collaborating with all stakeholders in achieving transformational innovation and business growth.

Advisors in Residence

The IGB welcomes individuals from academia and industry to serve in an advisory capacity to guide our efforts in collaborative, team-based science.

William Barley

 

William Barley
Faculty Advisor to the Director, in Team Science
Associate Professor of Communication
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

William Barley is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research explores the processes enabling individuals from different disciplines to work together to achieve goals they would be unable to achieve alone. Barley's work also focuses on how individuals in organizations design and use technologies to collaborate across knowledge boundaries, drawing on theoretical traditions of symbolic interactionism, social constructivism, and practice perspectives from communication studies, organization studies, and science and technology studies. Barley's research aims to capture collaborative work as it occurs within and across organizations, using ethnographic methods and other analytic techniques, both qualitative and quantitative, to uncover themes in his data. In particular, Barley has built and tested theory using social network analysis, regression models, natural language processing, and agent based simulation modeling. Barley held an appointment as one of the IGB's inaugural Director's Fellows.

James O'Dwyer

 

James O'Dwyer
IGB Director's Fellow
Associate Head and Associate Professor, Plant Biology
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

James P. O’Dwyer is Associate Head and Associate Professor in the Department of Plant Biology. His research focuses on the emergent properties of complex systems, especially the stability and biodiversity of ecological communities and the ways in which humans interact with and affect these properties. He works with theoretical models and a broad range of data to understand patterns of biodiversity, from tropical forests to host-associated microbial systems like the human microbiome. Ecological systems are the archetypal complex systems, typically heterogeneous, display non-equilibrium phenomena, are strongly interacting, noisy, and adapt over time. O'Dwyer combines theory, experiment, and empirical data to try to understand how ecological processes drive the patterns of species and organisms seen in nature. Some phenomena are almost universal across widely differing systems, which aids the prediction of patterns of biodiversity with limited knowledge of the underlying processes. Other patterns are highly contingent, providing important signatures of the differences between ecological systems. His research explores that tension, with the ultimate goal of establishing what are the key forces driving biodiversity across the globe.

James Sharp

 

James Sharp
Distinguished Senior Advisor to the IGB Core Facilities
Former President and CEO, Carl Zeiss Microscopy

James Sharp obtained his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering before starting his career at Carl Zeiss Inc. He was involved with producing the world’s first electron scanning microscope and installing and calibrating many of the electron and industrial light microscopy instruments currently in use today. Sharp helped coordination acquisition, development, and integration of microscopy businesses and technologies. He later worked as head of the U.S. based Zeiss Microscopy, leading ZEISS to invest in innovative companies Cellomics and Atto Instruments, serving as board members for these and other operating companies under ZEISS. Sharp retired as President and CEO of Carl Zeiss Microscopy, LLC, and served as a ZEISS Senior Advisor, where he provided insight into the MicroImaging Market and the commercialization of microscopy. Sharp started a partnership with Core Facilities at the IGB allowing the Core to become a ZEISS labs@location center. As Distinguished Senior Advisor, Sharp will use his knowledge of industry and business surrounding microscopy to help Illinois commercialize system development of microscopy applications, enhance microscope optics and usage, and collaborate with industry representatives and introduce them to Illinois.

Previous Advisors in Residence

Brian Allan

 

Brian Allan
IGB Director's Fellow
Professor of Entomology
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Brian Allan is a Professor of Entomology, Associate Director of Academic Affairs, and Affiliate of Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Allan is broadly interested in the ecology of infectious diseases, particularly diseases transmitted via the bite of an infected arthropod (e.g., ticks, mosquitoes). Much of his research focuses upon the consequences of human-mediated global change, such as climate change and human land-use, on the risk of exposure to parasites and pathogens carried by wildlife. While his work on these questions is in a wide variety of wildlife communities and disease systems, Allan is especially interested in understanding the effects of landscape change on the emergence and transmission of tick-borne diseases. He uses a broad array of tools in approaching these questions, including molecular technologies, remote sensing applications, and theoretical modeling. Allan was appointed as one of the IGB's inaugural Director's Fellows.