Walter Eugene Massey is an American educator, physicist, and executive. President Emeritus of both the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), and of Morehouse College, he is chairman of the board overseeing construction of the Giant Magellan Telescope. During his long career, Massey has served as head of the National Science Foundation, director of Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), chairman of Bank of America, and as trustee chair of the City Colleges of Chicago. He has also served in professorial and administrative posts at the University of California, University of Chicago, Brown University, and the University of Illinois.
Paul Edward Gray was the 14th president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for his accomplishments in promoting engineering education, practice, and leadership at MIT and in the world at large.
Hans Michael Mark was a German-born American government official who served as Secretary of the Air Force and as a Deputy Administrator of NASA. He was an expert and consultant in aerospace design and national defense policy.
The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) is a council, chartered in each administration with a broad mandate to advise the president of the United States on science and technology. The current PCAST was established by Executive Order 13226 on September 30, 2001, by George W. Bush, was re-chartered by Barack Obama's April 21, 2010, Executive Order 13539, by Donald Trump's October 22, 2019, Executive Order 13895, and by Joe Biden's February 1, 2021, Executive Order 14007.
Robert Loren Jaffe is an American physicist and the Jane and Otto Morningstar Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was formerly director of the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics.
James Ross Macdonald, son of John Elwood Macdonald and Antonina Jones Hansell, was born on 27 February 1923 in Savannah, GA and died at the Carolina Meadows retirement community, Chapel Hill, NC on 30 March 2024. He was an American physicist, who was instrumental in building up the Central Research laboratories of Texas Instruments (TI).
Ernest Jeffrey Moniz, GCIH is an American nuclear physicist and former government official. From May 2013 to January 2017, he served as the 13th United States secretary of energy in the Obama administration. Prior to this, Moniz served as associate director for science in the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and undersecretary of energy from 1997 to 2001 during the Clinton administration. He is currently the co-chair and CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), as well as president and CEO of the Energy Futures Initiative (EFI), a nonprofit organization funded by the natural gas industry that works on climate and energy technology issues, which he co-founded in 2017.
Leon Pape was a medical physicist who received his BSc, MSc (1953) and PhD (1965) in Physics from the University of Southern California. He became certified in radiological physics by the American Board of Radiology and from 1955 to 1962 he worked as a radiological physicist at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles. He served at the California State University Los Angeles as radiation safety officer and as professor of physics until 1971, and worked on the development of studies in biophysics, radiological health physics, and electron microscopy. He was elevated to departmental head of physics at Cal State Los Angeles, and advocated with the California legislature to secure adequate funding for the 4-MeV Van de Graaf Laboratory, unique to CSU system. From 1971 until his death he worked at the August Krogh Institute at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, in the zoophysiological laboratory. His central research area was membrane biophysics.
Marcia F. Bartusiak is an author, journalist, and Professor of the Practice Emeritus of the Graduate Program in Science Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Trained in both communications and physics, she writes about the fields of astronomy and physics. Bartusiak has been published in National Geographic, Discover, Astronomy, Sky & Telescope, Science, Popular Science, World Book Encyclopedia, Smithsonian, and MIT Technology Review. The author of seven books, she is also a columnist for Natural History magazine.
Francis Lee Friedman was a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Warren Elliot Henry was an American physicist, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his work in the fields of magnetism and superconductivity. He made significant contributions to the advancement of science and technology and education, training and mentoring several generations of physicists.
Roderic Ivan Pettigrew is an American physicist, engineer, and physician who is CEO of EnHealth and Executive Dean for EnMed at Texas A&M University. From 2002-November 2017, he was the founding director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He is a pioneer and world expert in cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Ciara Sivels is an American nuclear engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. She was the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from the University of Michigan. She was named an IF/THEN Ambassador in 2019 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Willie S. Rockward is a physics professor and has served as the chair of the department of physics and engineering physics at Morgan State University since August 2018. His research interests include Micro/Nano Optics Lithography, Extreme Ultraviolet Interferometry, Metamaterials, Terahertz imaging, Nanostructure Characterization, and Crossed Phase Optics. From 2018 to 2020 he was the president of the National Society of Black Physicists.
Alfred Zakhele Msezane is a South African physicist. He is a professor in the Department of Physics at Clark Atlanta University, and the Founding Director of the Center for Theoretical Studies of Physical Systems. His research is primarily in theoretical atomic physics and condensed matter theory. He also carries out research in mathematical physics, and image processing.
James Edward Young is an American physicist who was the first black tenured faculty member in the Department of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a founding member of the National Society of Black Physicists and a mentor for Shirley Ann Jackson.
Julia Mae Phillips is an American physicist. She began her career in materials research on thin films on semiconductors and has transitioned into leadership roles in science policy. She currently serves on the National Science Board.
Aviva Brecher is a Romanian-American applied physicist and transportation scientist who studied magnetic levitation for many years at the John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, a research center of the United States Department of Transportation.
Michael Duryea Williams is an American physicist, professor at Clark Atlanta University, and current president of the AVS: Science and Technology of Materials, Interfaces, and Processing. He is the first African American president of AVS.
Steven Leslie Richardson is an American physicist and professor of electrical engineering. He is currently a professor emeritus at Howard University, a co-principal investigator in the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center for Integrated Quantum Materials, and a Faculty Associate in Applied Physics in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University.
