2014 Bioscience Speaker Information
George W. Carmany III ’62
 George W. Carmany III |
George Carmany is a graduate of Amherst College, from which he holds its Distinguished Service Award, and served as an officer in the United States Navy. Carmany began his business career with Bankers Trust Company in its International Banking Department, working in New York, and for four years in Sydney, Australia as an executive director of its merchant banking subsidiary. In 1975, he joined American Express Company, where he held senior positions at the corporate level and in its international banking division, including senior vice president, Corporate Strategic Planning, and senior executive vice president and chief administrative officer of American Express Bank. In 1990 Carmany joined American Express’ investment management and private banking subsidiary, The Boston Company, as senior executive vice president, treasurer and director, a position he held until the sale of the company to Mellon Financial Corporation in 1993. Carmany subsequently served as chairman of the Olympia and York Bondholders' Steering Committee, and formed G.W. Carmany and Company, an advisory business in financial services and life sciences.
George Carmany is a director of the Macquarie Infrastructure Company, New York, NY; and is a senior advisor to Brown Brothers Harriman and Company; Essex Woodlands Health Ventures; EnGeneIC Ltd.; a biotechnology company in Sydney, Australia; and The Asia Link Group of Beijing, PRC. He retired as a director of Sun Life Financial, Toronto, Canada, in 2010, and served until 2005 as chairman and CEO of Helicon Therapeutics, a biotechnology company founded by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Roche Pharmaceuticals and OSI Pharmaceuticals.
Carmany is the past chairman of The New England Medical Center; a member of The President’s Circle of the National Academies; a trustee and member of the Executive Committee of Bentley University; vice president of the Alumni Council of Amherst College; and past chairman of the Board of Associates of The Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He is married to the former Judith Jermain Lawrence, and they are the parents of two children, Bill, of Los Angeles, CA, and Elizabeth of New York.
Carmany, together with Gerald R. Fink '62, are the founders and organizers of the Gerald R. Fink '62 Bioscience Symposium.
Gerald R. Fink ’62
 Gerald R. Fink |
Gerald R. Fink '62 is a founding member of the Whitehead Institute and the American Cancer Society Professor of Genetics at MIT. He was director of the Whitehead Institute from 1990 to 2001. His research focuses on the molecular biology of yeast and fungal infectious disease. He was the first to describe transformation in fungi—the stable uptake of DNA into the genome of yeast cells. He is past president of the Genetics Society of America. Among his many awards are the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Medal of the Genetics Society of America, Emil Christian Hansen Award (Denmark), the Yale Science and Engineering Award, the Yale Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal, the 2001 George Beadle Award and the 2010 Gruber Award in Genetics. Fink has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Medicine and the American Philosophical Society. Fink has been the founder of two biotechnology companies, Myco Pharmaceuticals and Ironwood Pharmaceuticals.
Fink, together with George Carmany ’62, are the founders and organizers of the Gerald R. Fink ’62 Bioscience Symposium.
Ginger L. Graham
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Ginger L. Graham |
Ginger Graham is the president and CEO of Two Trees Consulting. She consults to first-time CEO’s in the areas of leadership, strategy, board-effectiveness and organization-building.
Graham is the former president and chief executive officer of Amylin Pharmaceuticals, a biopharmaceutical company based in San Diego, Calf., focused on diabetes and obesity. During her tenure at Amylin, the company launched two first-in-class medicines for people with diabetes, was listed on the Nasdaq 100 and was rated as one of the Top 10 places in the industry for scientists to work.
Prior to her time at Amylin, Graham was group chairman, Office of the President for Guidant Corporation, a major cardiovascular medical device manufacturer based in Indianapolis, Ind. During her tenure at Guidant, the company launched the world’s leading stent platform, was listed in the Fortune 500, was recognized by Fortune Magazine as one of the Best Companies to Work For in America and was included in Industry Week Magazine’s 100 Best Managed Companies in the World.
Graham has received numerous awards and honors including being named as the Emerging Company Executive of the Year by the Global Health Council in 2005, a finalist in Marketwatch’s CEO of the Year in 2006, and named as the American Diabetes Association’s Woman of Valor award in 2006. She was included in Pharma VOICE’s “100 of the Most Inspiring People” list in 2006 and World Pharmaceuticals magazine named her number 10 on a list of 40 most influential people in the industry in 2007. Graham was the first woman CEO named to the PhRMA Board and Executive Committee.
Graham serves on the boards of directors for Walgreen Co., Genomic Health, Inc., Proteus Digital Health Pharmaceutical Division, Surefire Medical, Elcelyx Therapeutics, Clovis Oncology, Inc. and the Circle of Life Hospice Foundation. She is a member of the Harvard Business School Health Industry Alumni Advisory Board, the University of Arkansas Chancellor’s Campaign Steering Committee and the advisory board for the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado. She also serves on the advisory board for the Kellogg Center for Executive Women and co-chairs the Scientific Council of the University of Colorado’s Center for Women’s Health Research. Graham taught entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School and has written for the Harvard Business Review.
Ginger Graham received a Bachelor of Science in agricultural economics from the University of Arkansas, and holds an MBA, with distinction, from Harvard University.
Tyler Jacks
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Tyler Jacks
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Tyler Jacks is the director of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at M.I.T. Jacks received his B.A. in biology from Harvard College in 1983. His Ph.D. thesis was performed with Harold Varmus at the University of California, San Francisco. He was a post-doctoral fellow with Robert Weinberg at the Whitehead Institute at MIT and joined the faculty at M.I.T. in 1992.
Jacks has pioneered the use of gene targeting technology in the mouse to study cancer-associated genes and to construct mouse models of many human cancer types, including cancers of the lung, brain and ovary. His laboratory has made seminal contributions to the understanding of the effects of mutations of several common cancer-associated genes. This research has led to novel insights into tumor development, normal development and other cellular processes, as well as new strategies for cancer detection and treatment.
Jacks has published more than 200 scientific papers; he has served on the Board of Scientific Advisors of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Board of Directors of the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR); he is also a past president of the AACR. He serves as an advisor to several biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. Jacks was a Merck Fellow of the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation, a Markey and a Searle Scholar and is currently a Daniel K. Ludwig Scholar in Cancer Research.
In recognition of his contributions to the study of cancer genetics, he received the AACR Outstanding Achievement Award and the Amgen Award from the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the Chestnut Hill Award for Excellence in Medical Research, the Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research and was named a member of M.G.H. Cancer Center’s 2013 One Hundred. He was elected to both the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies in 2009, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012 and the inaugural class of Fellows of the AACR Academy in 2013. He is also chair of the National Cancer Advisory Board.
Peter Millard '76
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Peter S. Millard |
Peter Millard ’76 is a family physician and epidemiologist who has spent his career teaching, doing clinical work and clinical research. He is originally from the Greater Portland area of Maine. After graduating from Amherst, he went to medical school at the University of Vermont. After finishing his clinical training in family medicine, he and his wife Emily worked for three years in a hospital in rural Zimbabwe, where he became interested in public health. Afterward, he got his Ph.D. in epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and worked for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the Epidemic Intelligence Service. While at UNC, he began to do clinical AIDS care during the most difficult phase of the HIV epidemic, when there were many cases and no effective treatments. Subsequently, he was a faculty member in the Family Medicine Residency Program at Eastern Maine Medical Center and taught epidemioloy at the University of Maine.
Emily and Peter recently returned from five years in Mozambique, one of the poorest countries in the world and among those most affected by the HIV epidemic. He taught epidemiology, directed the medical school teaching clinic and did clinical research at the Catholic University of Mozambique in Beira. He worked firsthand in ground zero of the AIDS epidemic. His current area of research is male circumcision to prevent female-to-male HIV transmission, and his team recently developed a new minimally invasive technique for voluntary male circumcision which they expect to facilitate the WHO's plan to circumcise 20 million men in Sub-Saharan Africa. Peter, upon his return from Mozambique in the summer of 2013, is currently adjunct professor at the University of New England, where he teaches infectious disease epidemiology. Peter has several Amherst alumni in his family, including two children, Maria Millard ’07 and Cameron Millard ’05.
Robert Sauer '69
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Robert Sauer |
Robert Sauer '69 is the Salvador E. Luria Professor of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former chairman of the Biology Department at MIT. Dr. Sauer sent the following information:
"I grew up in a working-class town in the Hudson-river valley, interested in science and how “things” work. I started college at Amherst in the Fall of 1965, planning to be a physicist. Although physics and math were my strongest subjects, it became clear that my abilities were not on par with classmates who excelled in these areas. I left without a degree in 1968, and was lucky to get a job working as a research technician at Mass General Hospital in Boston. There, I learned and became interested in protein biochemistry. I eventually returned to Amherst, graduating with a degree in biophysics in 1972. I attended grad school at Harvard, where I worked on bacteriophage lambda, and I joined the MIT faculty where I’ve been since 1978. Over the years, my students and I have worked on protein-nucleic interactions, protein folding, and molecular machines that destroy proteins and resculpt the cellular proteome. My honors include election to the National Academy of Sciences (1996), the Hans Neurath Award (2008), and the Stein and Moore Award (2013)."
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Carolyn Sufrin |
Carolyn Sufrin '97
Carolyn Sufrin '97 is an assistant professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. She graduated from Amherst College where she doubled majored in anthropology and chemistry; she was also the recipient of a Watson Fellowship. Sufrin received her medical degree from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and also holds an M.A. in social anthropology from Harvard University. After completing her residency training in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Pittsburgh/Magee Womens Hospital, she did a Fellowship in Family Planning at University of California at San Franciso. Her focus is on expanding access to reproductive health care for incarcerated women, as well as training ob/gyn residents in the care of vulnerable populations. This has involved starting a referral-level ob/gyn clinic at the San Francisco Jail and conducting research and implementing programs to increase family planning and other reproductive health services for this vulnerable population of women. Sufrin has also been active in reproductive health policy for incarcerated women at the local, state and national levels, especially around restricting the use of restraints in pregnant women, working closely with the ACLU and other advocacy organizations. She serves on the board of directors of the National Commission on Correctional Health Care. In addition, Sufrin is currently integrating these interests into her doctoral studies as a Ph.D. candidate in the UCSF/UCB joint program in medical anthropology. Her dissertation, based on ethnographic fieldwork, is entitled “Jailcare: Women, Incarceration, and the Medical Safety Net in America”