2015 Bioscience Speaker Information

Information will be posted as it arrives.

George W. Carmany III ’62

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George W. Carmany III
50 Congress Street
Suite 936
Boston, Mass. 02109
Tel: 617/542-5918
george@carmany.com

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.

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2015 Bioscience Speaker Information
Kelly L. Close
804 Haight St
San Francisco, CA 94117
Tel: (415) 241-9500
kelly.close@diatribe.org 

 Kelly Close ’90

Kelly Close is Editor-in-Chief of diaTribe, an educational resource for people with diabetes. She chairs the diaTribe Foundation, a nonprofit established to improve the lives of people with diabetes and pre-diabetes and to advocate for action. Kelly is also the founder of Close Concerns, a healthcare information company focused exclusively on diabetes and obesity. She is a graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Business School. Kelly's passion for the field comes from her extensive professional work as well as from her personal experience, having had diabetes for nearly 30 years.  

 

 


 Inger K. Damon ’84

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2015 Bioscience Speaker Information
Inger K. Damon
Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention
MS A-30
1600 Clifton Rd NE
Atlanta, GA 30333
Tel: (404) 639-4931
IDamon@cdc.gov

Inger Damon, MD, PhD, is director of CDC’s Division of High-Consequence Pathogens and Pathology (DHCPP). She currently is the CDC Incident Manager for the Ebola 2014 response and started in this position in the beginning of August. Prior to this role, Dr. Damon served as the chief of DHCPP’s Poxvirus and Rabies Branch. Dr. Damon joined CDC in 1999 as a medical officer (Lieutenant Commander) in the US Public Health Service, working with the poxvirus team. She went on to serve in various leadership positions within the poxvirus group, completing extensive work in smallpox preparedness with various HHS programs. In 2006, the Poxvirus and Rabies programs merged administratively to form the Poxvirus and Rabies Branch and Dr. Damon was named its first Branch Chief.Prior to joining CDC, Dr. Damon completed her medical residency in internal medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. In addition, she fulfilled a clinical fellowship in infectious diseases and a post-doctoral fellowship in molecular virology at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland with Dr. Bernard Moss.Dr. Damon is also a Clinical Assistant Professor at Emory University in Atlanta and is the director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Smallpox and Other Poxvirus Infections. She participates in several international poxvirus review panels. In addition, Dr. Damon is the author of multiple book chapters and author/co-author of more than 100 peer-reviewed publications, primarily related to poxviruses and poxvirus-associated disease.Dr. Damon graduated from Amherst College with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and went on to earn her MD and PhD in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Connecticut.


Gerald R. Fink ’62

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Gerald R. Fink
Whitehead Institute/MIT
Nine Cambridge Center
Cambridge, Mass. 02142
Tel: 617/258-5215
gfink@wi.mit.edu

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.


David C. Page

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2015 Bioscience Speaker Information
 

Dr. David C. Page
Whitehead Institute
Nine Cambridge Center
Cambridge, Mass. 02142
Tel: (617) 258-5203
page_admin@wi.mit.edu

David C. Page is Director of the Whitehead Institute, Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His laboratory studies the foundations of mammalian reproduction, with particular attention to the X and Y chromosomes, infertility, and the fetal origins of sex cells—the precursors of eggs and sperm.

His lab, in collaboration with researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, was the first to complete the sequence of human Y chromosome—revealing why, despite popular arguments to the contrary, the Y is not doomed to eventual extinction. He has reconstructed the evolution of today’s X and Y chromosomes from an ancestral pair of chromosomes that existed 300 million years ago, and discovered molecular evolutionary mechanisms by which the Y chromosome became functionally specialized in spermatogenesis. He discovered and characterized the most common genetic cause of spermatogenic failure in humans: deletion of the AZFc region of the Y chromosome. He also found that aberrant crossing-over within the Y chromosome’s palindromes underlies a wide range of disorders of sexual differentiation, including Turner syndrome. Most recently, his lab has shown that a small number of genes on the Y chromosome conserved over many millions of years of evolution are active across the body and may actually be contributing to differences in disease susceptibility and severity observed between men and women.

Page trained in the laboratory of David Botstein, at MIT, while earning an M.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Medical School and the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program. His honors include a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, Science magazine’s Top Ten Scientific Advances of the Year (in 1992 and again in 2003), and the 2011 March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology. He is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.


 Frank E. Thompson ’87

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2015 Bioscience Speaker Information

Frank E. Thompson
HIV Services Program
Health Department
City of Kansas City, MO.
Tel: (816) 513-6222
frank.thompson@kcmo.org

Frank E. Thompson, Jr. '87 is the manager of HIV Services for the Kansas City (Mo) Health Department (KCHD). Thompson holds a bachelor of arts degree in political science from Amherst College and a master of science in public health (community health education) from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Frank has held several diverse positions both as a worker and a volunteer in the areas of public health programming and community/organizational development. He worked for the City of Fort Worth, Texas overseeing several transitional projects for the Fort Worth Department of Employment and Training. He also worked briefly as a consultant to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health - AIDS Office (now the HIV/AIDS Bureau) focusing on asset mapping and youth outreach. Frank spent three years working as a community health educator in Springfield, Mass.

In 1993, Thompson left his chosen career field of public health to work in the area of education reform. After initially working for two years with an alternative education agency called The Learning Tree, Frank embarked on an ambitious endeavor; creating a community-based charter school. After three years of developing and operating the second charter school in Springfield, Mass., Frank chose to return to his primary career path – public health.

In February 1999 he started with the KCHD as a public health planner. Frank’s current duties as the manager of HIV Services include oversight of six HIV-related funding streams totaling almost $7 million. His previous duties as the strategic management officer included strategic planning, development of community partnerships, management of accreditation efforts, oversight of quality improvement efforts, departmental liaison to the Kansas City Health Commission and community health planning & advocacy.  

Thompson’s early projects with KCHD included overseeing completion of the city’s first Minority Health Indicators Report and facilitating KCHD’s participation in a statewide initiative to examine the role and function of public health at the state and local level. During his tenure with KCHD, he has played a lead role in KCHD’s effort to become the first accredited local public health agency in Missouri (2004), drafting comprehensive plans for HIV/AIDS prevention efforts and care services in the Kansas City region (2005 & 2006), and creating the first Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP) for Kansas City (2004-2006). He was also involved in efforts to pass clean indoor air ordinances to reduce exposure to environmental tobacco smoke in the Kansas City region (2001-2009).

Thompson has represented KCHD on several statewide advisory councils. Locally, he has served on or provided professional support for numerous city-wide commissions, planning bodies and/or advisory bodies. Within KCHD Frank has provided leadership for creation of the Kansas City Health Commission, and initiating the KCHD Office of Strategic Management. Nationally, Frank served on the HIV/STI Workgroup for the National Association of County and City Health.
 
On a personal note, Frank has been married to Carole Bowe-Thompson since 1994 and they have three daughters (Nia, Annisah and Gabrielle). Frank also serves or has served on the board of directors for several local non-profit agencies engaged in providing health services to Kansas City. He also serves as a mentor for a young man whose mother approached him because of his work on issues related to HIV/AIDS.