Melinda K. Duncan is an American biomedical researcher, specializing in lens and eye development. [1] She earned a bachelor's degree from Lafayette College, and completed a doctorate at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, then conducted post doctoral research at the National Eye Institute. [2] Duncan is a professor at the University of Delaware, where in 2024, she was named the Trustees Distinguished Professor of Biology. [2] [3]
Melinda French Gates is an American philanthropist and a former multimedia product developer and manager at Microsoft. Born and raised in Dallas, Texas, she graduated from Duke University and started working at Microsoft in 1987. Shortly afterwards, she began dating the company's co-founder and then-CEO Bill Gates, whom she married in 1994. In 2000, she and Gates co-founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest private charitable organization. The couple, who have three children together, divorced in 2021. In 2024, she resigned from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to pursue philanthropy independently, having received $12.5 billion for charitable work as part of her separation agreement.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is an American private foundation founded by Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates. Based in Seattle, Washington, it was launched in 2000 and is reported to be the third largest charitable foundation in the world, holding $69 billion in assets as of 2020. The primary stated goals of the foundation are to enhance healthcare and reduce extreme poverty across the world, and to expand educational opportunities and access to information technology in the U.S. Key individuals of the foundation include Warren Buffett, chief executive officer Mark Suzman, and Michael Larson.
The University of Delaware is a privately governed, state-assisted land-grant research university in Newark, Delaware, United States. UD offers four associate's programs, 163 bachelor's programs, 136 master's programs, and 64 doctoral programs across its ten colleges and schools. The main campus is in Newark, with satellite campuses in Dover, Wilmington, Lewes, and Georgetown, Delaware. With 24,221 students as of Fall 2023, UD is the largest university in Delaware by enrollment.
The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 is an 1826 historical romance novel by James Fenimore Cooper. It is the second book of the Leatherstocking Tales pentalogy and the best known to contemporary audiences. The Pathfinder, published 14 years later in 1840, is its sequel; its prequel, The Deerslayer, was published a year after The Pathfinder. The Last of the Mohicans is set in 1757, during the French and Indian War, when France and Great Britain battled for control of North America. During this war, both the French and the British used Native American allies, but the French were particularly dependent; they were outnumbered in the Northeast frontier areas by the British. Specifically, the events of the novel are set immediately before, during, and after the Siege of Fort William Henry.
David Lennox Mills was an American computer engineer and professor emeritus at the University of Delaware. He was an Internet pioneer who led the Gateway Algorithms and Data Structures (GADS) Task Force. He was known as the internet's "Father Time" for designing the Network Time Protocol, which is intended to synchronize all participating computers across different computer systems and networks to within a few milliseconds of Coordinated Universal Time.
Lois Duncan Steinmetz, known as Lois Duncan, was an American writer, novelist, poet, and journalist. She is best known for her young-adult novels, and has been credited by historians as a pioneering figure in the development of young-adult fiction, particularly in the genres of horror, thriller, and suspense.
Catherine Bertini is an American public servant. She is the 2003 World Food Prize Laureate. She was the Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Program from 1992 to 2002. She served as the UN Under-Secretary for Management from 2003 to 2005. Currently she is a distinguished fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the Chair of the Board of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) and the Chair of the Executive Board of the Crop Trust.
Jane Richards Roth is an American attorney and jurist serving as a Senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. She was previously a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Delaware.
Jacqueline Jones is an American social historian and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history. She held the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas from 2008 to 2017, is the Ellen C. Temple Professor of Women’s History Emerita at the University of Texas at Austin, and is the past president of the American Historical Association. University of Texas at Austin. Her expertise is in American social history in addition to writing on economics, race, slavery, and class. She is a Macarthur Fellow, Bancroft Prize Winner, and Pulitzer Prize winner in 2024 after twice being a finalist.
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.
Jill Tracy Jacobs Biden is an American educator who has been the first lady of the United States since 2021 as the wife of President Joe Biden. She was the second lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017 when her husband was vice president. Since 2009, she has been a professor of English at Northern Virginia Community College, and is believed to be the first wife of a vice president or president to hold a salaried job during the majority of her husband's tenure.
Kirsty Ellen Duncan is a Canadian politician and medical geographer from Ontario, Canada. Duncan has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for the Toronto riding of Etobicoke North since 2008, and she served as deputy leader of the government in the House of Commons from 2019 to 2021. Duncan has previously served as minister of science and minister of sport and persons with disabilities. She has published a book about her 1998 expedition to uncover the cause of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic.
Katherine Dorothea Duncan-Jones, was an English literature and Shakespeare scholar and was also a Fellow of New Hall, Cambridge (1965–1966), and then Somerville College, Oxford (1966–2001). She was also Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford from 1998 to 2001. She was a scholar of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
Fei-Fei Li is a Chinese-American computer scientist, known for establishing ImageNet, the dataset that enabled rapid advances in computer vision in the 2010s. She is the Sequoia Capital professor of computer science at Stanford University and former board director at Twitter. Li is a co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and a co-director of the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab. She served as the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 2013 to 2018.
Gagandeep Kang FRS is an Indian microbiologist and virologist who has been leading the work on enteric diseases, diarrheal infections and disease surveillance at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation since 2023.
Lisa LaTrelle Blunt Rochester is an American politician who is a U.S. Senator-elect for Delaware. She has served as the U.S. representative for Delaware's at-large congressional district since 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, she is the first woman, and first African American, to represent Delaware in Congress.
Donna Theo Strickland is a Canadian optical physicist and pioneer in the field of pulsed lasers. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018, together with Gérard Mourou, for the practical implementation of chirped pulse amplification. She is a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.
Kathleen Jennings is an American lawyer and politician serving as the Attorney General of Delaware. She is a member of the Democratic Party.
LaShanda Teresa James Korley is a Distinguished Professor of Materials Science at the University of Delaware and an expert in soft matter, polymers, and nature-inspired materials. On a larger scale, Korley is also working on developing strategies and technologies to prevent plastic waste in landfills and oceans by upcycling plastic waste to more valuable products. She leads such efforts through the Center for Plastics Innovation, the Center for Research in Soft Matter and Polymers, and also the Center for Hybrid, Active, and Responsive Materials (CHARM). Korley was awarded the 2019 National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers Lloyd N. Ferguson Young Scientist Award for Excellence in Research.
Joanne Katz is an epidemiologist, biostatistician, and Professor of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She holds joint appointments in the Departments of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Ophthalmology within the School of Medicine. Her expertise is in maternal, neonatal, and child health. She has contributed to the design, conduct and analysis of data from large community-based intervention trials on nutritional and other interventions in Indonesia, Philippines, Bangladesh, Nepal, and other countries.