Gillian Small is currently the president of World Science U, the higher education arm of World Science Festival.
Previously, she was the University Provost & Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at Fairleigh Dickinson University from 2016 through 2022.
Prior to that, she served as the Vice Chancellor for Research at the City University of New York.
Small received her PhD in the Biological Sciences in 1983 from Wolverhampton Polytechnic - now the University of Wolverhampton in England, where she also completed her undergraduate education in the Biological Sciences. She moved to the US in 1985 to conduct postdoctoral research at the Rockefeller University in New York, in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Christian DeDuve, a cytologist and biochemist. Small's research focus is organelle biogenesis and molecular regulation of lipid metabolism; she has published and lectured widely in this area.
Previously, Small served on the faculty at the University of Florida (1988), where she led her own independent research program to study peroxisome biogenesis and the molecular regulation of lipid metabolism. In 1992, she became a faculty member at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where she directed a laboratory as well as served as Director of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology.
At CUNY, Small was instrumental in redesigning doctoral education in the sciences and in enhancing the University’s scientific research infrastructure. She established CUNY’s first Postdoctoral Program for postdoctoral fellows across the University and the Technology Commercialization office. She also played a key role in establishing several new research institutes, and both envisioned and developed a new CUNY Advanced Science Research Center.
The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York is a public research institution and post-graduate university in New York City. Serving as the principal doctorate-granting institution of the City University of New York (CUNY) system, The CUNY Graduate Center is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity". The school is situated in the landmark B. Altman and Company Building at 365 Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, opposite the Empire State Building. The CUNY Graduate Center has 4,600 students, 31 doctoral programs, 14 master's programs, and 30 research centers and institutes. A core faculty of approximately 140 is supplemented by over 1,800 additional faculty members drawn from throughout CUNY's eleven senior colleges and New York City's cultural and scientific institutions.
Joanna Sigfred Fowler is a scientist emeritus at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. She served as professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and director of Brookhaven's Radiotracer Chemistry, Instrumentation and Biological Imaging Program. Fowler studied the effect of disease, drugs, and aging on the human brain and radiotracers in brain chemistry. She has received many awards for her pioneering work, including the National Medal of Science.
Harvey Franklin Lodish is a molecular and cell biologist, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Founding Member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and lead author of the textbook Molecular Cell Biology. Lodish's research focused on cell surface proteins and other important areas at the interface between molecular cell biology and medicine.
Mary Ellen Jones was an American biochemist. She was notable for discovery of carbamoyl phosphate, a chemical substance that is key to the biosynthesis of arginine and urea, and for the biosynthesis of pyrimidine nucleotides. Jones became the first woman to hold a chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the first woman to become a department chair at the medical school. She was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. She was also president of the Association of Medical School Departments of Biochemistry, president of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and president of the American Association of University Professors. The New York Times called her a "crucial researcher on DNA" and said that her studies laid the foundation for basic cancer research. She died of cancer on August 23, 1996.
Tobias C. Walther is a professor of molecular metabolism at the Harvard School of Public Health, a professor of cell biology at the Harvard Medical School, and an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 2015. His primary responsibilities are to provide leadership in research and teaching in the scientific fields of metabolism, membrane biology and lipids. Walther is also the Executive Director of the Harvard Chan School Analytics Center and Director of the Harvard Chan Research Center on Causes and Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease. Before his appointment at Harvard, Walther was an associate professor of cell biology at the Yale School of Medicine.
Jennifer Lea Stow is deputy director (research), NHMRC Principal Research Fellow and head of the Protein Trafficking and Inflammation laboratory at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), The University of Queensland, Australia. She was awarded her PhD from Monash University in Melbourne in 1982. As a Fogarty International Fellow, she completed postdoctoral training at Yale University School of Medicine (US) in the Department of Cell Biology. She was then appointed to her first faculty position as an assistant professor at Harvard University in the Renal Unit, Departments of Medicine and Pathology at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. At the end of 1994 she returned to Australia as a Wellcome Trust Senior International Medical Research fellow at The University of Queensland where her work has continued. Stow sits on national and international peer review and scientific committees and advisory boards. She has served as head of IMB's Division of Molecular Cell Biology, and in 2008 she was appointed as deputy director (research).
Susan Wente is an American cell biologist and academic administrator currently serving as the 14th and current President of Wake Forest University. From 2014 to 2021 she was Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at Vanderbilt University. Between August 15, 2019 and June 30, 2020, she served as interim Chancellor at Vanderbilt.
Judith P. Klinman is an American chemist, biochemist, and molecular biologist known for her work on enzyme catalysis. She became the first female professor in the physical sciences at the University of California, Berkeley in 1978, where she is now Professor of the Graduate School and Chancellor's Professor. In 2012, she was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Barack Obama. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Philosophical Society.
Sally Ann Kornbluth is a cell biologist and the 18th president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in January 2023. She is the second female president of the university.
Yolanda Theresa Moses is an anthropologist and college administrator who served as the 10th president of City College of New York (1993–1999) and president of the American Association for Higher Education (2000–2003).
Ruth Lehmann is a developmental and cell biologist. She is the Director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, succeeding David Page. She previously was affiliated with the New York University School of Medicine, where she was the Director of the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine, the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Professor of Cell Biology, and the Chair of the Department of Cell Biology. Her research focuses on germ cells and embryogenesis.
Malcolm Daniel Lane was a biochemist who spent most of his career on the faculty at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. Lane served as the head of the Department of Biological Chemistry from 1978 to 1997, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1987, and was named a University Distinguished Service Professor – the institution's highest academic title – in 2001. Lane's research focused on the biochemistry of lipids and lipid metabolism, and the resulting physiological mechanisms regulating adipogenesis and obesity.
Marion Sewer (1972-2016) was a pharmacologist and professor at the University of California, San Diego's Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences known for her research on steroid hormone biogenesis and her commitment to increasing diversity in science. Much of her research centered around cytochrome P450, a family of enzymes involved in the conversion of cholesterol into steroid hormones. She died unexpectedly at the age of 43 from a pulmonary embolism on January 28, 2016, while traveling through the Detroit airport.
Viola Vogel, also known as Viola Vogel-Scheidemann, is a German biophysicist and bioengineer. She is a professor at ETH Zürich, where she is head of the Department of Health Sciences and Technology and leads the Applied Mechanobiology Laboratory.
Ruma Banerjee is a professor of enzymology and biological chemistry at the University of Michigan Medical School. She is an experimentalist whose research has focused on unusual cofactors in enzymology.
Jean Elise Schaffer is an American physician-scientist. She is a Senior Investigator at the Joslin Diabetes Center, where she also serves as Associate Research Director, and she is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Her work focuses on fundamental mechanisms of metabolic stress responses and the pathophysiology of diabetes complications.
Robyn Leigh Tanguay is an American researcher, academic and educator. She is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Environmental and Molecular Toxicology at Oregon State University. She is the director of Superfund Research Program, the director of Pacific Northwest Center for Translational Environmental Health Research and the director of Sinnhuber Aquatic Research Laboratory at OSU.
Alexandra C. Newton is Distinguished Professor of pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego. Newton runs a multidisciplinary Protein kinase C and Cell signaling biochemistry and cell biology research group in the School of Medicine, investigating molecular mechanisms of signal transduction in the Phospholipase C (PLC) and Phosphoinositide 3-kinase signaling pathways. She has been continuously funded by the US National Institutes of Health since 1988.
Gilda A. Barabino is the president of the Olin College of Engineering, where she is also a Professor of Biomedical and Chemical Engineering. Previously, she served as the Dean of The Grove School of Engineering at the City College of New York, and as a professor in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Chemical Engineering and the CUNY School of Medicine. On March 4, 2021, she became the President-Elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Carla M. Koehler is an American biochemist who is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research considers mitochondria and the processes which import proteins to their appropriate locations in the organelles. She was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2018.