Five new members elected to ANL board

Five new members have been named to the University’s Board of Governors for Argonne National Laboratory. The University operates Argonne for the U.S. Department of Energy. The board provides guidance, oversight, direction and advice to Argonne’s management.

The board’s 21 members are drawn from the University’s trustees, officials and faculty, and from industry and other universities. The five new board members are Charles Curtis, Johann Deisenhofer, Cherry Murray, Harvey Plotnick and Irving Wladawsky-Berger.

Curtis is president and chief operating officer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a charitable organization devoted to activities and programs intended to reduce the risk of use and prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

Previously, he was executive vice president and chief operating officer of the United Nations Foundation and a partner in Hogan & Hartson L.L.P., and director of that firm’s energy group.

Curtis served as deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy from August 1995 to May 1997. He was the department’s chief operating officer and chaired its Laboratory Operations Board. He led bilateral delegations to Japan, China, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Russia and South Africa, and represented the department at minister’s meetings in Mexico and at the Asia Pacific Economic Council. Curtis also has served as DOE under secretary.

Deisenhofer, a Nobel laureate, is a regental professor and professor in biochemistry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, where he holds the Virginia and Edward Linthicum distinguished chair in biomolecular science. He also is an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Deisenhofer shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering the structure of a molecule vital to photosynthesis, the process by which plants convert sunlight into chemical energy. A native of Bavaria, Germany, Deisenhofer is an expert in X-ray crystallography of proteins, which is used to show how these molecules function and how they interact with other molecules to perform various biological reactions.

Murray is senior vice president for physical sciences research for Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, N.J. She manages nearly 250 researchers and builds partnerships with Lucent’s business units. She also manages and initiates research programs in fundamental physics, materials science, chemistry, biological computation, microelectromechanics, nanoelectronics, high-speed electronics, novel optical devices, hardware reliability and packaging, as well as other technologies for telecommunications applications and future products.

Previously, Murray was director of Bell Lab’s Physical Research Laboratory and headed semiconductor physics research. Her research has focused on the physics of solid and liquid matter in a number of cross-disciplinary fields, including optical phenomena at surfaces and in semiconductors, complex fluids, disordered and small-scale systems, phase transitions and clusters and nanostructures.

Plotnick is president and chief executive officer of Molecular Electronics Corp., headquartered in Chicago. The company is using nanotechnology to develop molecular-sized computer components.

Previously, he was president and chief executive officer of Paradigm Holdings Inc., and president and chief executive officer of Contemporary Books Inc., one of the two largest publishers of adult basic education instructional materials.

Plotnick has been a trustee of the University since 1993 and is a trustee of the Chicago Academy of Sciences.

Wladawsky-Berger is responsible for IBM’s next-generation Internet initiatives, for advanced architectures and technologies in IBM’s server group, and for strategy and development of the company’s Linux initiative.

He leads IBM’s participation in the growing trend toward open standards for interoperability in Internet business. He is working to make the Linux operating system and the open source movement part of IBM’s commitment to e-business and the next generation of the Internet. He also is leading the server group’s continuing evolution toward leading-edge technologies and architectures.

Wladawsky-Berger is co-chair of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, and a member of the Information Technology Advisory Board of the New School University.

He is a former member of the Computer Sciences and Technology Board of the National Research Council and of the Fermilab Board.