John Culberson was elected in 2000 to represent the 7th District, a seat formerly held by President George H. W. Bush and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Archer. In Congress, John’s priorities include strengthening the economy by cutting taxes, creating jobs, and balancing the budget; securing the border, advancing medical and scientific research; and improving Houston transportation.

John is a member of the House Appropriations Committee, which is responsible for funding the federal government. John serves on the Commerce, Justice and Science Subcommittee, where he’s a tireless advocate for law enforcement and NASA, the Financial Services Subcommittee where he works to preserve our free market system, and the Homeland Security Subcommittee, where he’s committed to securing our borders and winning the War on Terror.

A life-long Texan, John Culberson earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in History from Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1981. After college, he worked for his father’s political consulting and advertising agency before earning a Juris Doctorate degree from South Texas College of Law in Houston. Before his election to Congress, he practiced law as a civil defense attorney with the Houston firm Lorance and Thompson.

Andrew C. von Eschenbach, M.D., is the commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and was formerly the director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Dr. von Eschenbach was President-elect of the American Cancer Society at the time of his appointment to NCI. A nationally recognized urologic surgeon and oncologist, Dr. von Eschenbach previously served as executive vice president and chief academic officer of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and held the Roy M. and Phyllis Gough Huffington Clinical Research Distinguished Chair in Urologic Oncology. Himself a cancer survivor, Dr. von Eschenbach's contributions to scientific literature include more than 200 articles, books, and book chapters. Many influential organizations have recognized his leadership and accomplishments, including the American Medical Writers Association, the American Urological Association, the Lance Armstrong Foundation, the American Radium Society, and "The Best Doctors in America" publication. In 2006, Time Magazine chose Dr. von Eschenbach as one of the 100 most influential people to shape the world.

A native of Philadelphia, Dr. von Eschenbach earned his medical degree from Georgetown University School of Medicine. After completing his residency in urologic surgery at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, he was an instructor in urology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He also served as a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy Medical Corps.

Dr. Mauro Ferrari is an internationally recognized expert in the development, refinement and application of biomedical nanotechnology. He was trained in mathematics, engineering and medicine. He has published approximately 200 peer-reviewed articles. He received many national and international awards including the James A. Shannon Director's Award from the National Institute of Health, elected Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), received the Department of Defense (DOD) Breast Cancer Research Program (BCRP) Innovator Award in 2008, National Young Investigator Award of National Science Foundation from 1993 to 1998 and the Wallace H. Coulter Award for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in 1999. Dr Ferrari was also the first recipient of a Research Superiority Award of the Emerging Technology Fund of the State of Texas. From 2003 to 2005, he served as Special Expert on Nanotechnology and Eminent Scholar at The National Cancer Institute, where he led in the development of the NCI's program in Nanotechnology, which remains the largest program in NanoMedicine in the world. Dr. Ferrari currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief for “Biomedical Microdevices: BioMEMS and Biomedical Nanotechnology” since 1997.

Dr. Ferrari has more than 30 U.S. and International patents awarded to his credit and has founded several startup companies. Furthermore, he is the scientific founder of NanoMedical Systems (NMS) in Austin, Texas and Leonardo Biosystems. He also currently serves as the Director of Scientific Strategy at the Arrowhead Research Corporation.

Yuliang Zhao
Chinese Academy of Sciences
CAS Nanosafety Lab: Lab for Bio-Environmental Effects of Nanomaterials & Nanosafety
Professor

Dr. Zhao has a degree in Chemistry (1985, Sichuan Univ.) and in Physics/Chemistry (M.D.1996 & Ph.D. 1999, Tokyo, Japan). He moved to Chinese Academy of Sciences from RIKEN (Japan) as a Hundred Elite Professor in 2001. Dr. Yuliang Zhao is a founder of CAS Nanosafety Lab: Lab for Bio-Environmental Effects of Nanomaterials & Nanosafety, which was recently renamed as “Lab for Biomedical Effects of Nanomaterials & Nanosafety”. The research activity mainly focuses on the biological impacts of nanomaterials. Dr Zhao’s other research interest includes the theoretical simulation of the interplay between nano-systems (as nanotubes) and bio-systems (as bio-membrane or ion channels). He has published more than 120 peer-reviewed journal articles, one book “Nanotoxicology” which is the first textbook in the nanotoxicology field. He has been invited and given 47 Invited Lectures at international conferences worldwide and domestic conferences.

Dr. Michael Teitell is Chief of the Division of Pediatric and Neonatal Pathology in the Departments of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine and Pediatrics at UCLA. He earned Bachelors and Masters degrees as a Departmental Scholar in Biochemistry from UCLA in 1985, and M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the UCLA Medical Scientist Training Program in 1993. Dr. Teitell is co-Director of the Cancer Cell Biology Program Area at UCLA and Chair of the UCLA Intercollegiate Athletic Committee. He received the FOCIS/Millenium Pharmaceuticals Award for Genomics Research and a Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Scholar Award. In 2004 he was elected to the American Society of Clinical Investigators (ASCI) and in 2008 was a Stohlman Scholar of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Dr. Teitell develops new imaging and nanomechanical approaches to study development and cancer of the immune system. His group generated the first genetic model that accurately resembles the majority of lymphocyte cancers afflicting humans.

Distinguished Scientists Panel Featuring the Nobel Laureates:
Dr. Robert F. Curl and Dr. Ferid Murad

Dr. Robert F. Curl is the Kenneth S. Pitzer - Schlumberger Professor of Natural Sciences, member of the Department of Chemistry at Rice University and a University Professor. Dr. Curl received his bachelor's degree from Rice University in 1954. He earned his doctorate in 1957 from the University of California at Berkley under Dr. Kenneth Pitzer. After a one-year post-doctoral stint in the Mallinkrodt Laboratory at Harvard University , Dr. Curl returned to Rice University as an assistant professor in 1958, where he remains to this day. A great deal of Dr. Curl's research has been collaborative, involving other principals both at Rice University and elsewhere. One of these collaborations led to the discovery of fullerenes and the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Dr. Curl's current research is in the area of physical chemistry with emphasis on spectroscopy, gas phase kinetics, and environmental monitoring. He is also a Scholar at the Rice Quantum Institute and a member of the National Academy of Science.

Dr. Ferid Murad is an American physician and pharmacologist, and a co-awardee of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Since 1997, he has been at The University of Texas Health Science Center, where he is currently director of the Institute of Molecular Medicine and holds the John S. Dunn Distinguished Chair in Physiology and Medicine. Dr. Murad joined the University of Virginia in 1965, where he was made professor in 1970, before moving to Stanford in 1981, where he served as chair of Medicine at the Palo Alto Veterans Hospital. Dr. Murad then moved to Abbott Laboratories, where he was vice president for research and developed a large number of new pharmaceuticals.

Dr. Murad's key work was in showing that nitroglycerin and related drugs worked by releasing nitric oxide into the body, with the gas somehow acting as a signaling molecule in the cardiovascular system, making blood vessels dilate. The missing steps in the signaling process were filled in by Robert F. Furchgott and Louis J. Ignarro, for which the three shared the 1998 Nobel Prize (and for which Drs. Murad and Furchgott received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1996).

Dr. Murad received his undergraduate degree from DePauw University, and M.D. and pharmacology Ph.D. degrees from Case Western Reserve University.

For two decades, Rebecca Richards-Kortum has focused on translating research that integrates advances in nanotechnology and molecular imaging with microfabrication technologies to develop optical imaging systems that are inexpensive, portable, and provide point-of-care diagnosis. This basic and translational research is highly collaborative and has led to new technologies to improve the early detection of cancers and other diseases, especially in impoverished settings. Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) use micro-scale technology to design low-cost, reusable platforms for point-of-care (POC) diagnostics. When used with contrast agents, these rugged and portable optical imaging systems detect molecular signatures of pre-cancer, assess tumor margins, and monitor a patient's response to therapy. Current systems are being tested and applied through multidisciplinary collaborations with clinicians and researchers at Rice, the UT M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, UT Health Science Center-Houston, UT at Austin, the University of Arizona, and the British Columbia Cancer Agency. Over the past few years, Richards-Kortum and collaborators have translated these technologies from North America to both low- and medium-resource developing countries (Botswana, India, Taiwan, Mexico, and Brazil). Notable awards Richards-Kortum has received include: the Presidential Young Investigator (1991) and Presidential Faculty Fellow (1992) awards from the National Science Foundation; the Becton Dickinson Career Achievement Award from the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (1992); named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Professor (2002); received the Sharon Keillor Award for Women in Engineering Education (2004) and Chester F. Carlson Award (2007) from the American Society for Engineering Education. She served on the inaugural National Advisory Council for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering for the National Institutes of Health (2002-2007), was elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Biomedical Engineering Society (2008); received the Vice President Recognition Award by IEEE (2008); and was inducted into the National Academy of Engineers (2008).

Fazle Hussain's expertise is in transport phenomena, fluid mechanics, vortex dynamics, and turbulence, and is most known for his seminal contributions via experiments and numerical analysis to 'order within disorder' of fluid turbulence. He has also researched in holography, flow noise, flow control, drag reduction, cardiovascular dynamics, and nanolithography. Following his PhD in mechanical engineering in 1969 at Stanford, he was post-doc at Johns Hopkins, before starting his teaching career in 1971 at the University of Houston, where he is Cullen Distinguished Professor since 1989. He founded UH's Aerodynamics & Turbulence Laboratory and is the Director of UH's Institute of Fluid Dynamics. He has been recognized by the four topmost awards in fluid mechanics: the Fluid Dynamics Prize (1998) of the American Physical Society (APS), the Freeman Scholar Award (1984) and the Fluids Engineering Award (2000) of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and the Fluid Dynamics Award (2002) of the American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics (AIAA). He is a Fellow of APS, ASME and AIAA. He was the 2009 Moore Distinguished Scholar at Caltech, and holds Distinguished Visiting Professorships at Peking University (Beijing) and the Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore).

He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas, and is the Chair of the Mechanical Engineering Section of the National Academy of Engineering

Nicholas Peppas, Sc.D., the Fletcher Stuckey Pratt Chair in Engineering in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas, Austin. Dr. Peppas has contributed to research in several areas of drug delivery, biomaterials, biomolecular engineering, mass transfer, kinetics and reaction engineering, polymers and biomedical engineering. The multidisciplinary approach of his research in biomolecular engineering blends modern molecular and cellular biology with engineering to generate next-generation systems and devices, including bioMEMS (microelectromechanical systems) with enhanced applicability, reliability, functionality and longevity. The fundamental studies of his group have provided valuable results on biomaterials design and development.

Dr. Peppas is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the French Academy of Pharmacy. He has received numerous awards for his research, including the William H Walker, Jay Bailey, Materials Science, and Pharmaceutical and Bioengineering Awards of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), the Founders and Clemson Awards of the Society for Biomaterials, the Research Excellence Award for Best Research of the University of Texas, the Eurand Life Achievement Award, Founders and Heller Awards of the Controlled Drug Delivery, the Nagai Foundation Award for Research, and the General Electric Senior Research, Dow Chemical Engineering, Curtis McGrawand George Westinghouse Awards of ASEE.

He served as President of the Society for Biomaterials in 2003 and the Controlled Release Society in 1987, and as a Director of AIChE in 2000-2002. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, AIChE, and the American Physical Society.

Dr. Peppas holds a Dipl. Eng. from the National Technical University of Athens (1971); a Sc.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1973); a Doc. Hon. Causa from the University of Ghent, Belgium (1999); a Pharm. D. Hon. Causa from the University of Parma, Italy (1999); and a Doc. Hon. Causa from the University of Athens, Greece (2000).

Paolo Dario received his Dr. Eng. Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 1977. Currently, he is serving as the Professor of Biomedical Robotics at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa. Additionally, he teaches courses at the School of Engineering of the University of Pisa and at the Campus Biomedico University in Rome.

He has been a visiting Professor at Brown University, (Providence, RI), the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), (Lausanne, Switzerland), and at Waseda University, (Tokyo, Japan). He was the founder of the ARTS (Advanced Robotics Technologies and Systems) Laboratory and is currently the Co-ordinator of the CRIM (Center for the Research in Microengineering) Laboratory of the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, where he supervises a team of about 70 researchers and Ph.D. students. He is also the Director of the Polo Sant'Anna Valdera and a Vice-Director of the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna. Dr. Dario is the coordinator of many national and European projects, the editor of two books on the subject of robotics, and the author of more than 200 scientific papers (75 on ISI journals). Additionally, he is the Editor-in-Chief, Associate Editor and member of the Editorial Board of many international journals.

Prof. Dario has served as President of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society in the years 2002-2003, and he is currently Co-Chair of the Technical Committees on Bio-robotics and of Robo-ethics of the same Society. Prof. Dario is an IEEE Fellow, a Fellow of the European Society on Medical and Biological Engineering, and a recipient of many honors and awards, such as the Joseph Engelberger Award.

He is also a member of the Board of the International Foundation of Robotics Research (IFRR).

Dr. Eiji Osawa received formal education as chemist in Kyoto University, Japan, under strong influence of three great chemists, Zen-ichi Yoshida, Junji Furukawa and Ken'ichi Fukui, and became a thinking experimentalist in material science. Perhaps best known as the first scientist who conceived C60 molecule before its discovery by Kroto-Smalley-Curl in 1985, he himself is proud of being one of a handful of people who began earnestly using computers for atomistic simulation of molecular behaviors in the 1960th. He still is an ardent advocate of molecular mechanics. After retirement from Toyohashi University of Science and Technology in 2001, he re-discovered 5-nm diamond particles in 2003 and is still working on this novel and most produced nanocarbon.

Dr. Eiji Osawa has published more than 300 original papers in peered professional journals and contributed 200 articles on popular science and technology magazines in Japan.

Albert van den Berg received his PhD at the University of Twente in 1988 on the topic of chemically modified ISFETs. From 1988-1993 he worked in Neuchatel, Switzerland, at the CSEM and the IMT (prof. de Rooij) on the topic of miniaturized chemical sensors. From 1993 until 1999 he was research director Micro Total Analysis Systems (TAS) at MESA, University of Twente, a topic that was extended to Miniaturized Chemical Systems (MiCS) in 1999. In 1998 he was appointed as part-time professor "Micro and Nanofluidics", and later in 2000 as full professor on Miniaturized Systems for (Bio)Chemical Analysis in the faculty of Electrical Engineering, within the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology. In 2002 he received the Simon Stevin Master award from the Dutch Technical Science foundation (STW). In 2003 he was appointed as captain of the Nanofluidics Flagship within the national nanotechnology program Nanoned. His current research interests focus on microanalysis systems and nanosensors, nanofluidics and single cells on chips.

Dr. Pellis received his Ph.D. in Microbiology from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio in 1972 and performed his postdoctoral fellowship in Microbiology at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. He joined the NASA Johnson Space Center in October 1994, having previously been on the Faculty of Northwestern University Medical School, the University of Texas Medical School, and the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. Dr. Pellis completed a one-year assignment to NASA Headquarters as International Space Station (ISS) Program Scientist and Executive Secretary of the NASA Space Station Utilization Advisory Subcommittee (SSUAS) from May 2002 through August 2003, and directed the exploration cell science effort of the Biological Systems Office until January 2005 when he became Chief Scientist for Advanced Programs. In October 2005, Dr. Pellis was named Associate Director for the Human Research Program Science Management Office. In April 2007, he was named Senior Scientist for Space Life Sciences.