Joan Ridder Challinor is the former chairperson of the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science in the United States. She was appointed to the commission by President Bill Clinton in 1995. She served as vice chairperson of the commission from 2000 to 2003. She was designated as its chairperson on July 20, 2003, and served until January 28, 2004.
She was succeeded as Chairperson by Beth Dustan Fitzsimmons.
Challinor serves as the Chairperson of the Advisory Committee of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Radcliffe College. She is a member of the Madison Council at the Library of Congress. She is a founding member of the Louis Round Wilson Academy. She is a director of media conglomerate Knight-Ridder.
Barbara Wertheim Tuchman was an American historian, journalist and author. She won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for The Guns of August (1962), a best-selling history of the prelude to and the first month of World War I, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1971), a biography of General Joseph Stilwell.
William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist, a professor at Harvard University, and an author of works on urban sociology, race, and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods.
Sanford I. "Sandy" Weill is an American banker, financier, and philanthropist. He is a former chief executive and chairman of Citigroup. He served in those positions from 1998 until October 1, 2003, and April 18, 2006, respectively.
Mary Frances Berry is an American historian, writer, lawyer, activist and professor who focuses on U.S. constitutional and legal, African-American history. Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought where she teaches American legal history at the Department of History, School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the former chairwoman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Previously, Berry was provost of the College of Behavioral and Social Science at University of Maryland, College Park, and was the first African American chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Joan E. Strassmann is an American evolutionary biologist and the Charles Rebstock Professor of Biology at the Washington University in St. Louis. She is known for her work on social evolution and particularly how cooperation prospers in the face of evolutionary conflicts.
Mary Beth Norton is an American historian, specializing in American colonial history and well known for her work on women's history and the Salem witch trials. She is the Mary Donlon Alger Professor Emeritus of American History at the Department of History at Cornell University. Norton served as president of the American Historical Association in 2018. She is a recipient of the Ambassador Book Award in American Studies for In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. Norton received her Bachelor of Arts at the University of Michigan (1964). The next year she completed a Master of Arts, going on to receive her Ph.D. in 1969 at Harvard University. She identifies as a Democrat and she considers herself a Methodist. Mary Beth Norton is a pioneer of women historians not only in the United States but also in the whole world, as she was the first woman to get a job in the department of history at Cornell University.
Mahzarin Rustum Banaji FBA is an American psychologist of Indian origin at Harvard University, known for her work popularizing the concept of implicit bias in regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, and other factors.
The National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS) was an agency in the United States government between 1970 and 2008. The activities of the Commission were consolidated into the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Records of NCLIS are held at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and the University of Michigan Library, Special Collections as part of the Power Collection for the Study of Scholarly Communication and Information Transfer.
Uma Chowdhry was an American chemist whose career was spent in research and management positions with E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company. She specialized in the science of ceramic materials, including catalysts, proton conductors, superconductors and ceramic packaging for microelectronics.
Robert Sidney Martin is an American librarian, archivist, administrator, and educator. He is Professor Emeritus, School of Library and Information Studies, Texas Woman’s University, where he was the Lillian M. Bradshaw Endowed Chair until his retirement in 2008.
Robert Bingham Downs was an American writer and librarian. Downs was an advocate for intellectual freedom, and spent the majority of his career working against literary censorship. Downs authored many books and publications regarding the topics of censorship, and on the topics of responsible and efficient leadership in the library context.
Louis Round Wilson was an important figure to the field of library science, and is listed in "100 of the most important leaders we had in the 20th century," an article in the December 1999 issue of American Libraries. The article lists what he did for the field of library science including dean at the University of Chicago Graduate Library School, directing the library at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and as one of the “internationally oriented library leaders in the U.S. who contributed much of the early history of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions.” The Louis Round Wilson Library is named after him.
Linda S. Wilson is an American academic administrator who served as president of Radcliffe College from 1989 to 1999.
Herman Howe Fussler was an American librarian, library administrator, teacher, writer and editor, who was a pioneer in the use of microphotography. Fussler was ranked as one of the "100 of the Most Important Leaders we had in the 20th Century" by American Libraries. Fussler served as director of the University of Chicago libraries from 1948 to 1971, was Dean of the University of Chicago Graduate Library School, from 1961 to 1963, and was instrumental in the founding of the Regenstein Library. He helped create the Center for Research Libraries. He was an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Joan Givner is an essayist, biographer, and novelist, known for her biographies of women, short stories, and the Ellen Fremendon series of novels for younger readers that was finalist for the Silver Birch Awards, the 2006 Hackmatack Children's Choice Book Award for Ellen Fremedon, and the Diamond Willow Awards.
The University of Chicago Graduate Library School (GLS) was established in 1928 to develop a program for the graduate education of librarians with a focus on research. Housed for a time in the Joseph Regenstein Library, the GLS closed in 1989 when the University decided to promote information studies instead of professional education. GLS faculty were among the most prominent researchers in librarianship in the twentieth century. Alumni of the school have made a great impact on the profession including Hugh Atkinson, Susan Grey Akers, Bernard Berelson, Michèle Cloonan, El Sayed Mahmoud El Sheniti, Eliza Atkins Gleason, Frances E. Henne, Virginia Lacy Jones, William Katz Judith Krug, Lowell Martin, Miriam Matthews, Kathleen de la Peña McCook, Errett Weir McDiarmid, Elizabeth Homer Morton, Benjamin E. Powell, W. Boyd Rayward, Charlemae Hill Rollins, Katherine Schipper, Ralph R. Shaw, Spencer Shaw, Frances Lander Spain, Peggy Sullivan, Maurice Tauber and Tsuen-hsuin Tsien.
Yasushi Watanabe is a Japanese anthropologist and a full professor at Keio University. He earned a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Harvard University in 1997 with a dissertation on "Nurturing A Context: The Logic of Individualism and the Negotiation of the Familial Sphere in the United States." After post-doctoral fellowships at Cambridge and Oxford Universities, he joined Keio University's Graduate School of Media and Governance as well as Faculty of Environment and Information Studies in 1999. He attained the rank of full professor in 2005, and is one of Japan's most prominent experts on cultural policy, public diplomacy, and American Studies.
Eleanor Josephine Macdonald was a pioneer American cancer epidemiologist and cancer researcher influenced and mentored by Edwin Bidwell Wilson and Shields Warren. One of the earliest proponents of the idea that cancer was a preventable disease. She established the first cancer registry in the United States in Connecticut.
Elizabeth W. Stone was an American librarian and educator and president of the American Library Association from 1981 to 1982. In 1988 she was awarded Honorary Membership in the American Library Association. In 1998 she was honored with the Beta Phi Mu Award for distinguished service to education for librarianship.
Margaret Elizabeth Chisholm was an American librarian and educator and served as president of the American Library Association from 1987 to 1988. She promoted librarians as skilled in information technology.