Members

As Chief Data Officer and former Director of Health Services Research for the Louisiana Public Health Institute (LPHI), Dr. Thomas Carton leads multiple teams that conduct various types of health services research that span clinical research, quality improvement, and social epidemiology. As Principal Investigator of the Research Action for Health Network (REACHnet), Dr. Carton leads a multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary team that is creating a regional informatics, patient engagement, and research infrastructure to efficiently conduct comparative effectiveness research. Both positions underscore the importance of collaborative work grounded in frequent communication, careful planning and budgeting, realistic research objectives, and mentoring within and beyond my organization. He holds (or held) multiple leadership positions within PCORnet (the national Patient-Centered Research Network), including Chair of the PCORnet Steering Committee and leading or co-leading working groups on data linkage, health services, and public health research, research innovations, and cross-network collaborative research. Locally, Dr. Carton serves on the board of the community health information exchange, the Greater New Orleans Health Information Exchange. He is also an Adjunct Professor in Global Health Systems and Development at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, where he teaches doctoral-level econometrics classes and mentors pre-doctoral trainees in advanced statistical and econometric methods.

Dr. Cheng's research focus is sensing and data-driven modeling; simulation and analytics for process monitoring; quality control and performance optimization of complex systems; with special interests in nonlinear dynamics and the resulting chaotic patterns, recurrence, and self-similarity behaviors. In the field of manufacturing, he's interested in optimal design, uncertainty quantification, and sensing data analytics for change/anomaly detection, and in the field of healthcare, he's interested in data fusion, time series analysis, and epidemic modeling.

Dr. Wai-Yim Ching is a Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City in USA. He leads the Electronic Structure Group (ESG) in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. His research focuses on condensed matter theory and computational materials science using first-principles methods. He developed the orthogonalized linear combination of atomic orbitals (OLCAO) method particularly suitable for large complex systems including biomolecular systems. With more than 40 years of experience, he is an author or co-author of over 425 journal articles with Google Scholar H-factor 68. He is an Academician of World Ceramic Academy, Fellow of the American Ceramic Society, Fellow of the American Physical Society and Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in Britain. He received the University of Missouri’s Presidential Award for Sustained Career Excellence in 2017. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Ceramic Society and is on the Editorial Board of Nature Scientific Reports.

Rita Colwell is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland at College Park and at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, senior advisor and chairman emeritus at Canon US Life Sciences, Inc., and president and chairman of CosmosID, Inc.

Dr. Rita Colwell's interests are focused on global infectious diseases, water, and health. Dr. Colwell developed an international network to address emerging infectious diseases and water issues, including safe drinking water for both the developed and developing world, in collaboration with Safe Water Network, headquartered in New York City.

She served as the eleventh director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 1998 to 2004. In her capacity as NSF director, she served as co-chair of the Committee on Science of the National Science and Technology Council. Before joining NSF, Dr. Colwell was president of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute and a professor of microbiology and biotechnology. She was also a member of the National Science Board from 1984 to 1990.

One of Colwell's major interests is K-12 science and mathematics education, graduate science and engineering education, and the increased participation of women and minorities in science and engineering.

She has held many advisory positions in the U.S. government, nonprofit science policy organizations, and private foundations, as well as in the international scientific research community. Colwell is a nationally respected scientist and educator and has authored or co-authored 19 books and more than 800 scientific publications. She produced the award-winning film, "Invisible Seas," and has served on editorial boards of numerous scientific journals, including GeoHealth, which she founded at AGU in 2015.

Dr. Colwell has previously served as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the American Academy of Microbiology and also as President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Washington Academy of Sciences, the American Society for Microbiology, the Sigma Xi National Science Honorary Society, the International Union of Microbiological Societies, and the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS).

Dr. Colwell is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, the Royal Society of Canada, the Royal Irish Academy, the Bangladesh Academy of Science, the Indian Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Colwell is an honorary member of the microbiological societies of the UK, Australia, France, Israel, Bangladesh, Czechoslovakia, Royal Irish Academy, and the U.S. She has held several honorary professorships, including the University of Queensland, Australia.

Colwell has been awarded 62 honorary degrees from institutions of higher education, including her alma mater, Purdue University. A geological site in Antarctica, called Colwell Massif, has been named in recognition of her work in the Polar Regions. Colwell has published a new book, "A Lab of One's Own: One Woman's Personal Journey Through Sexism in Science".