Margaret Davidson, Director, NOAA Coastal Services Center
Margaret Davidson has devoted her career to the goal of ensuring that public science serves public needs and values. Director of NOAA’s Coastal Services Center since 1996, Davidson has maintained a singular focus on generating and providing useable products and services for nongovernmental, local, state and national coastal managers facing a range of challenges from hazards to ecosystem protection to beach nourishment. The key to Davidson’s approach, and the Center’s success, has been her recognition that client needs must drive institutional priorities. Continual work with users at the local and regional levels has ensured that the Center stays in touch with user priorities as they evolve, and has made the Center a national model for linking science and technology to decision making. Before coming to NOAA, Davidson served as executive director of the South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium. She began her coastal career as an assistant attorney general and special counsel for the Louisiana Department of Justice. Davidson holds a Master of Marine Affairs degree from the University of Rhode Island and a J.D. in natural resource law from Louisiana State University.

Susan Fitzpatrick, Ph.D., Vice President, James S. McDonnell Foundation
Susan Fitzpatrick is vice president of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, a philanthropy supporting research in the neurosciences. Fitzpatrick is renowned for her ability to rethink the obvious – not only to question the status quo, but to offer serious alternatives that significantly transform our capacity to think and act differently. Whether the topic is science funding broadly speaking, or biomedical research funding more specifically, Fitzpatrick has challenges for us. Why have we designed a federal science funding system that discourages innovation and ingenuity in favor of deeply entrenched safe bets? What is the relationship between science funding decisions and outcomes that matter to people? What is the relationship between promises made by scientists in the quest for funding, and the actual achievements of their research? These are some of the questions she brings to the fore, and through her funding initiatives, mentorship of colleagues (both junior and more senior), and service to the scientific research community, Fitzpatrick has devoted herself to cultivating science with impact. She received her Ph.D. in biochemistry and neurology from Cornell University Medical College in 1984.

Richard Jefferson, Chief Executive Officer, Cambia, Canberra, Australia
Richard Jefferson has devoted his career to ensuring that technological innovation can be applied to the greatest areas of human need. A molecular biologist by training, he is the founder of CAMBIA, a non-profit organization whose mission is “to democratize innovation: to create a more equitable and inclusive capability to solve problems using science and technology.” In particular, CAMBIA focuses on developing key enabling technologies in the area of agricultural biotechnology, and putting them in the public domain so that they cannot be privatized and controlled by parochial interests. Among many other CAMBIA initiatives, Richard founded BIOS, an open source movement for biological innovation, in “response to inequities in food security, nutrition, health, natural resource management and energy,” and aimed at “enabling diverse solutions through decentralized innovation.” His expertise in intellectual property matters and agriculture and biotechnology research strategy and policy worldwide have become widely recognized. In 2003, he was named by Scientific American as one of the world's 50 most influential technologists. In 2005, he received the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) "Leadership in Science Public Service Award." He was chosen as an Outstanding Social Entrepreneur by the Schwab Foundation and is a regular participant and panelist at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting at Davos. He also is an accomplished guitarist and mandolin player.

Shirley Laska, Professor Emerita of Sociology, Center for Hazards Assessment, Response & Technology, University of New Orleans
Shirley Laska has dedicated most of her life to protecting the people and landscape of southern Louisiana from natural disasters. As an environmental sociologist she works to find real world solutions to the problems of disaster preparedness, disaster response and environmental protection. Laska knows all too well that the decisions we make about how we structure our government, industry and built environment can protect us from such disasters or exacerbate the damage they cause. In the years leading up to Hurricane Katrina, she developed scenarios of what would happen if a significant storm hit New Orleans and presented them not simply to the academic community, but government decision-makers at the local and national level as well – careful to point out how the poorest communities would be underwater without transportation to make it to safety. Her predictions were tragically accurate. Undeterred she continues to fight to protect the people of the city and the small coastal communities that she loves. She established the Center for Hazards, Assessment, Response and Technology (CHART) at the University of New Orleans to conduct applied research to identify successful strategies to recover from both natural and technological disasters. She received the American Sociological Association’s Environment and Technology Section achievement award in 2000 and its Public Understanding of Sociology Award in 2008.

Ramesh Singh, Chief Executive, ActionAid International, Johannesburg, South Africa
Trained as seed technologist at the University of Edinburgh (UK), most of Ramesh Singh’s work has revolved around poverty alleviation in developing countries. Singh has worked with ActionAid for over 20 years, initially in the Gambia, then as country director in Ethiopia, Nepal (where he was born) and Vietnam, as Asia regional director in Bangkok, as operations director in London and as ActionAid International’s chief executive since December 2003. He successfully led ActionAid’s process of internationalization and the delivery of the organization’s strategic objectives of Rights to End Poverty. In recent years, Singh has been known for his work on changing the rules and regulations that exacerbate poverty in developing countries and confronting donors and recipients (developing countries) to find a way in which aid itself can contribute to the end of aid. He argues that donor communities must go beyond the rhetoric around ‘country ownership’ to find forms of international cooperation that support developing countries to achieve more self-sufficient financing of their own growth strategies, their own natural resources and their own public policies. Singh and his colleagues from ActionAid are instrumental in developing projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America that enable people living in poverty to claim their rights – to, for example, education, food and drugs for treating HIV/AIDS.

Neal Woodbury, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Arizona State University
Neal Woodbury is a chemist who is exceptional in his willingness to encourage his students to face the societal aspects of their own research. As director of the Center for BioOptical Nanotechnology at ASU’s Biodesign Institute, and now more recently as deputy director and chief scientist of the Biodesign Institute, Neal has been a well-placed and articulate advocate for interdisciplinary science as a means of providing researchers with a broader vision to address real-world problems. This vision of interdisciplinarity has extended across the “two cultures” divide, as Neal has engaged in substantive research and training partnerships with the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes and the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at ASU on the political, social and ethical aspects of research at the Biodesign Institute. In particular, as principal investigator on an Integrated Graduate Education, Research and Training (IGERT) award, Neal committed his trainees to an immersive experience, designed by CSPO, in Washington, DC, which helped several trainees to radically different career paths. Neal has taken initiative in integrating societal perspectives into undergraduate training through his role in designing and teaching a learning community on nanotechnology in society, and into graduate training through encouraging a societal component in the required curriculum of the new Biological Design doctoral program. He also has opened up his laboratory to social science and humanities collaborators and led efforts to include them as equal partners in major science and engineering research projects.