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 Justin Carlson is a researcher, consultant, designer, and inventor in the medical device and biopharmaceutical sectors. He has a doctorate from New York University and has conducted research at Harvard and Scripps. His current efforts focus on developing biomarkers for detection of disease and weapons-grade biological agents. Carlson is also interested in strengthening American research through improving conditions for post-doctoral researchers who are the backbone of science in America today and will direct the research of tomorrow.
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 Dickson Diamond is the director of threat assessment for Los Angeles County Public Health's Emergency Preparedness and Response Program. He is responsible for the unit which establishes and maintains working relationships with federal, state, and local law enforcement and intelligence agencies, to enhance the ability to detect, assess, and investigate possible threats of bioterrorism within the Los Angeles region.
Prior to his current position, Dickson served as the chief psychiatrist to the FBI and chief medical officer to the U.S. Department of Justice's National Domestic Preparedness Office. He is a graduate of the U.S. Army Medical Management of Chemical and Biological Casualties program, and has served as an advisor to numerous government agencies as an expert on the psychological aspects of weapons of mass destruction. He received his B.S. in biology and psychology from Adelphi University and medical degree from Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, New York. He is board certified in psychiatry, having completed his psychiatry residency training at Cedar-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Prior to his employment with the FBI, Dickson served as psychiatric medical officer to the Central Intelligence Agency.
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 Rebecca Glazier is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her main subfields of study are international relations and American politics. Her current research interests are religion, international conflict and cooperation, and decision making. Her dissertation specifically addresses how religious beliefs affect decision making, and introduces the concept of providential belief systems as an explanatory tool.
Glazier earned her bachelor's degree in liberal arts with an emphasis in international relations from California State University Channel Islands in 2004, where she also served as the university's inaugural student body president. She earned her master's degree in political science from UC Santa Barbara in 2006. Glazier has published work on Just War Theory, international conflict and genocide, and political Islam. She also studied at Stanford University's Summer Institute in Political Psychology in 2005, and at the Women in International Security Summer Symposium in 2007. She is considering research, teaching, and/or civil service as potential career paths.
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 Scott Handley is the senior project manager for the Midwest Regional Center of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Disease Research (MRCE) at Washington University in St. Louis. The MRCE is one of ten NIAID-funded centers devoted to research on emerging infectious diseases and potential agents of bioterrorism and involves institutions in Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas. His position oversees many of the varied activities of a multi-institution research consortium with an annual budget of $6.5 million and more than twenty-five ongoing projects.
Handley received his Ph.D. in molecular microbiology and microbial pathogenesis from Washington University in 2006. His research focused on the host response to food-borne pathogens. Prior to his graduate work Handley was an emerging infectious disease research fellow at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he participated in research in the Viral and Rickettsial Zoonoses Branch. He has also been a long-time participant in the annual Workshop in Molecular Evolution at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and assisted in sequencing the genome of the pathogen Bartonella henselae at the University of Uppsala in Sweden.
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 Jun Isobe is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Biomedical Engineering Interdepartmental Program at UCLA. His current work deals with controlling eye movement through electrical stimulation of eye muscles. Jun's other research interests include bio-hybrid smart materials, and inter-scale effects of stochastic gating of ion channels. One of his career goals is to increase the visibility and role scientists play in shaping public policy.
Jun received his bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering from UCLA in 1998. He went on to work for Honeywell International Inc. (then AlliedSignal Aerospace) as a thermal systems analyst and later became a product manager for various components aboard the international space station. After seeing at first hand the advantages of combining biological function with machines, Jun decided to return to school to study bioengineering.
Jun received his master's degree in tissue engineering from UCLA in 2004. He took part in many different projects during his graduate studies before working with his current advisor, Jack W. Judy. His inspiration to pursue a career in public policy comes from his father, who was active in politics in Japan during the 1950s.
|  Ticora V. Jones is a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the Chemistry, Materials and Life Sciences Division. She is currently involved in projects related to the synthesis and characterization of polymer, organic, and nanoparticle compounds to create new functional polymeric systems. Jones's other interests include hybrid natural-synthetic biomaterials for tissue engineering, communication and public understanding of science, the implications of policy decisions on the scientific endeavor, and "green" for urban environments.
Jones received her bachelor's degree in materials science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000. During college she worked for a number of academic and industrial research labs including those at MIT, DuPont, IBM, and the Royal Institute of Technology of Sweden. After a year spent working in Washington, D.C., for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, she began graduate school at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the Polymer Science and Engineering department. Jones defended her dissertation, Synthesis and Characterization of ortho-Phenylene Ethynylene Oligomers: A New Scaffold for Foldamer Research, in July 2006. She received NIH and Ford fellowships while in graduate school and was very active in the graduate community mentoring undergraduate and graduate students. In addition, she co-founded the Graduate Education and Career Development Initiate, an organization dedicated to providing new student orientation, seminars, and workshops for graduate students at the University of Massachusetts.
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 Brian King is a third-year Ph.D. student working with Dr. Michael Sailor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego. His studies have focused on developing novel sensors for chemical and biological threats. King's research involves utilizing the optical properties and chemistry of porous silicon photonic crystals to detect gas-phase volatile organic compounds. He is also more broadly interested in understanding the role of science in international relations and global security.
King received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from Harvard University in 2004. His research activities focused on studying biological phenomena through single molecule fluorescence microscopy under the guidance of Dr. Sunney Xie. As an undergraduate, he served as assistant director for science and technology for the Harvard Model United Nations and taught Boston-area high school students through the Harvard Program for International Education. During his undergraduate studies King also interned at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.
|  Sonny Ly is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Applied Science at the University of California, Davis. His concentration is in advanced instrumentation and applications to the life sciences. Ly would like to apply his physics knowledge to understand biological processes. He is currently doing his research at the NSF Center for Biophtonics Science and Technology (CBST) at UC Davis, a state of the art laboratory that holds custom microscope systems and instrumentation for use in biology and the life sciences. He is interested in applying these technologies to study cancer cells and viruses.
Ly received his bachelors' degree in physics from UCLA in 2001. Besides doing various internships as an undergraduate, he also went on an education abroad program to Beijing under the leadership of Prof. Lynda Bell (UC Riverside). After returning, he worked for Raytheon Space Systems as a laser physicist for three years. Just prior to this program, he was doing a research at Yang Ming University in Taiwan on the detection of infectious agent by optical methods. In his free time, he loves to travel around the world.
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 Robin Pollini is a post-doctoral scholar in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on infectious disease prevention, with an emphasis on characterizing how societal-level policies and practices influence the health of marginalized populations. The provision of services to these populations during public health emergencies and the ethical considerations that arise in the context of emergency planning are also among her areas of research interest.
Pollini received her Ph.D. in infectious disease epidemiology, her M.P.H. from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a bachelor of science in foreign service from Georgetown University. Prior to completing her graduate studies she worked as an immunization policy specialist for both the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and the United South and Eastern Tribes.
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 T. S. Gopi Rethinaraj is an assistant professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. He received his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005 and was involved in research and teaching activities at the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security, a multi-disciplinary teaching and research program at Illinois devoted to military and non-military security policy issues. His doctoral dissertation, Modeling Global and Regional Energy Futures, explored the intersection between energy econometric modeling, climate policy, and nuclear energy futures.
Rethinaraj also had a four-year stint as journalist with the Indian Express based in Mumbai, and has written on science, technology, and security issues for Jane's Intelligence Review and Reuters. He received a visiting fellowship from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1999 for investigative reporting on South Asian nuclear security issues. His primary research interests include regional energy security, climate policy, energy technology assessment, nuclear fuel cycle policies and waste management policies. Rethinaraj is currently working on a book project exploring the statistical trends in global and regional energy production and trade since early industrialization. He also regularly teaches the course Nuclear Weapons and International Security, focusing on nuclear proliferation and arms control issues.
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 Tomoya Saito is a research associate at Keio University Global Security Research Institute, Tokyo, Japan, and the project manager for "Research and Development Towards Better Bio-Preparedness in Japan" sponsored by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology. Saito's research interests are vaccine development and procurement in bioterrorism preparedness.
Saito received his M.D. from the School of Medicine, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan in 2000 and his M.P.H. from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2006, where he concentrated in Public Health Preparedness in Practice. He previously completed research in molecular parasitology on Apicomplexan parasites over five years.
Since the end of 2004, Saito has been a member of the smallpox vaccine and preparedness research committee in Japan; researching, analyzing clinical data, and drafting vaccine stockpile policy using agent-based modeling. Saito enjoys playing ice hockey, ski, tennis, listening to jazz and classical music, and traveling.
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 Frank Smith is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Chicago. His dissertation examines military and civilian decision making about biological warfare and biodefense using case studies and textual analysis. He received his B.S. in biological chemistry in 2000, also from the University of Chicago.
Smith is particularly interested in the interface between international relations and technological innovation. He has worked on a variety of projects that address technology and national security at the RAND Corporation, Argonne National Laboratory, and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
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 Carlos Vera is a postgraduate researcher and lecturer in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of California, San Diego and professor of medicine at Universidad Autonoma de Baja California. He has concentrated his studies in molecular bioengineering and mathematical modeling of erythrocytes. His research interests include the elucidation of the molecular basis of erythrocyte membrane mechanics and its application in novel diagnostic/therapeutic tools and biomimetic technologies (such as drug delivery systems and biosensors).
Concurrently with his training in medicine and bioengineering, Vera has been working in emergency response and management in Mexico since 1985. He was team leader of rescue operations during Mexico City's 1985 earthquake. He was emergency management director for Tijuana from 1992 to 1997 and disaster response coordinator for Tijuana's Red Cross from 2003 to 2005. Currently he is a volunteer instructor and advisor at the Mexican Red Cross and Baja's fire departments. His principal interest in the emergency management field is to develop sustainable public policies to improve the emergency response in the U.S.-Mexico border region. Vera received his bachelor's degree in industrial electrical engineering from Instituto Tecnologico de Tijuana in 1985, M.D. from Universidad Autonoma de Baja California in 1995, and his M.S./Ph.D. in bioengineering from UC San Diego in 2002.
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 Andrew Womack is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and third-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. His current research is focused on understanding the genetic determinants of cell tropism in human cytomegalovirus. He is also interested in both emerging infectious diseases and public health in developing countries. Womack is a 2000 graduate of North Carolina State University, receiving degrees in biology and chemistry. While at NCSU, he was an undergraduate research associate in the Department of Genetics, studying the molecular evolution of floral development genes in A. thaliana. He was a summer undergraduate research fellow at the Center for Human Genome Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he studied human chromosome 16 with the DOE Human Genome Project.
Prior to beginning graduate studies at Princeton University, Womack was a member of the 2000 corps of Teach for America. He taught elementary school in Baltimore, Maryland, and received his M.S. in education from the Johns Hopkins University in 2002.
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 Karen Yee is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the epidemiology graduate group at the University of California, Davis. She received her B.S. degree in cell and developmental biology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1999.
After receiving her B.S. degree, Yee worked on a national, multi-center, NIH-funded family genetic research project in patients with ankylosing spondylitis at the Spondylitis Association of America. A year later, she worked on other clinical research projects in the area of rheumatology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center where she managed and assisted in launching a clinical trials center in the Division of Rheumatology. During her time at Cedars-Sinai, she accompanied a team of medical professionals to remote and rural areas of Guatemala to provide medical care to people without access to medical services. She also volunteered to assist in data collection on an Orangutan Health project in Sumatra, Indonesia.
Yee's research interests are in infectious disease epidemiology, zoonotic diseases, and simulation modeling. Her dissertation project focuses on transmission of low pathogenic avian influenza within the live bird market system in Southern California.
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