Stephen Lemire has nearly twenty years experience as an executive director of professional membership associations. Prior to joining the NPSMA, the organizations he directed focused on public health, behavioral health, and health policy. In particular, he is the former Executive Director of the Massachusetts Health Officers Association and the Massachusetts Business Group on Health.

Mr. Lemire also has nearly fifteen years experience in graduate education. He is currently a Senior Instructor in the Healthcare Management Program at Cambridge College. He has been an adjunct faculty member in the Health Management and Policy program at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and in the Masters of Business Administration program at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He had also been the Director of the undergraduate Health Care Management Program at Rivier College in Nashua, NH.

Mr. Lemire has two degrees in Health Services Administration from the University of Lowell (MA) where he was a past recipient of the Clinical Service Award. He is interested in nonprofit management and has written several articles about professional associations. He has served on committees for the National Association of County and City Health Officials, the National Business Coalition on Health, the Non Profit Alliance, and on local boards of organizations that address the need for improved community behavioral health services.

Elizabeth Friedman, Ph.D. PSM Program Manager College of Science and Letters Illinois Institute of Technology

Elizabeth Friedman, one of the founding members of the National Professional Science Master’s Association (NPSMA), currently serves as the Convener for the NPSMA Board of Directors. She has been involved with PSM programs since 2003 and serves on various NPSMA committees including the educational metrics committee, best practices committee, alumni committee, and oversight committee. Dr. Friedman is the Program Manager for the professional science master’s degree programs at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). IIT’s four PSM programs: analytical chemistry, materials and chemical synthesis, biology, and health physics, are all offered online, providing graduate education to working professionals across the nation.

Dr. Friedman earned her PhD and MA in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago, and her BA in anthropology from the University of Virginia. Her interests in the ancient Near East as well as South and Central America have taken her to field projects in Turkey, Israel, and Peru. Her dissertation on the relationship between ceramic and metal technology in early Anatolia steered her towards the laboratory to analyze the composition and manufacturing processes of artifacts as representations of ancient technologies. She continues to conduct research on archaeological material at the Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory and is a member of the Center for Synchrotron Radiation Research and Instrumentation at IIT.

CONVENER

Cynthia Bainton, MBA Administrative Officer, Biotechnology Initiative Northeastern University

Cynthia Bainton is administrative coordinator of the Biotechnology PSM Program and Biotechnology Initiative at Northeastern University in Boston, MA.  She joined Northeastern in 2003, when the Biotechnology PSM Program was in its first year and has been a major contributor to its growth from 3 students to its current enrollment of 100 students.  Ms. Bainton manages all administrative aspects of a program that is interdisciplinary across four colleges.  This has given her extensive experience with academic, administrative, and student issues.  She works closely with the program‟s faculty and staff to implement improvements to the program with an emphasis on quality and service. She currently serves on the NPSMA's Peer Review Committee.

Previously Ms. Bainton held positions in development and administration at the International Institute of Boston (IIB), a non-profit social services agency serving immigrants and refugees.  As secretary of the Institute's board of directors, she became knowledgeable about non-profit board governance. As coordinator of the Institute‟s capital campaign, she gained experience in donor relations and event production. She joined IIB after six years as an ESL/EFL teacher at EF International Language Schools in Boston and the American Language Institute in Lisbon, Portugal. Ms. Bainton earned her MBA from Northeastern University and her BA in English from Bowdoin College.

William W. Durgin, Ph.D. University Executive for Research & External Support California Polytechnic State Institute

Bill Durgin joined California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs in 2006.  His prior academic post had been that of Associate Provost and Vice President for Research at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.  He made major contributions to undergraduate and graduate academic programs, research programs, and adult education programs for all engineering, science, management, and humanities and arts programs.  Professor Durgin is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Dr. Durgin received the Sc.B. (1964) and Ph.D. (1970) degrees in mechanical engineering from Brown University and the M.S. (1966) degree from the University of Rhode Island.  He is well known for research in the fluid mechanics area and has made substantial contributions to engineering education through his work on project-based learning.  He received the ASME Curriculum Innovation Award, the ASME Service Award, and a NASA Significant Achievement Award.  He presently serves as chair of the Committee on Honors of the ASME.

Dr. Durgin led numerous accreditation efforts under ABET outcomes assessment and methodology.  He served on the Engineering in Mass Collaborative, identifying and implementing best practices in K-12 STEM education in support of the Massachusetts Frameworks.  He served on the Central Mass Biomedical Initiative board, the Manufacturing Assistance Center board, the Massachusetts Extension Partnership board, and is a proponent of economic development through strengthening of the high technology base.  He has succeeded in bringing engineering, science, and management resources together to form the Bioengineering Institute that was successfully launched in 2004.  He currently serves on the P-16 Council in San Luis Obispo.

Dr. Durgin has held many positions in professional societies and in organizations supporting engineering education at the national and state levels.  He is a member of Sigma Xi, Phi Kappa Phi, and Tau Beta Pi.  A professional engineer, Dr. Durgin is registered in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Florida.  He has served on boards, study groups, and editorial boards for NASA, ASME and other organizations.  He is the author of more than seventy journal articles, edited and contributed to several books, and holds two patents. Dr. Durgin has served as a member of the Executive Committee on the Engineering Deans Council, and served as a member of the ASEE Public Policy Committee.

Loida Escote-Carlson, Ph.D. Director, Master of Biotechnology Program Pennsylvania State University

Loida Escote-Carlson is currently the Program Director of the Master of Biotechnology program at Penn State University and a member of the Board of Directors of the National Professional Science Masters Association (NPSMA). Loida earned her Ph.D. degree in Molecular Genetics at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. After Ph.D., she joined the biotechnology company, Cangene Corporation in Toronto, Ontario, as a Research Scientist working on the development of proprietary bacterial hosts for heterologous gene expression (this industry experience proved to be valuable in her subsequent establishment of the biotechnology program at Penn State).

Two years later, Dr. Escote-Carlson was recruited to the the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada by the 1993 Nobelist in Chemistry, Dr. Michael Smith. At UBC, she established a dedicated graduate teaching and training laboratory in molecular biology which enjoyed tremendous success in training graduate students, faculty and research staff, as well as in conducting outreach programs in biotechnology.

For family reasons, she and her husband moved to Penn State to join the then Life Sciences Consortium (now Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences) under the directorship of Dr.Nina Fedoroff (former Science Adviser to the Bush administration). At Penn State, Dr. Escote-Carlson established successfully a similar program as the one she did at UBC; in addition, she proposed and launched the Master of Biotechnology program which continues to train and educate graduate students for rewarding and diverse careers in the biotechnology and related industry. The program enjoys 100% graduation and employment rate of its graduates.

Kirk E. Jordan, Ph.D. Emerging Solutions Executive IBM Corporation

Kirk Jordan is the Emerging Solutions Executive in IBM's Deep Computing organization within the Systems and Technology Group. In this role, he has responsibility for overseeing development of applications for IBM's advanced computing architectures, investigating and developing concepts for new areas of growth for IBM especially in the life sciences involving high performance computing, providing leadership in high-end computing and simulation in such areas as systems biology, medical and diagnostic imaging, and high-end visualization and is the Deep Computing technical representative to IBM's Healthcare and Life Sciences Industry unit. In addition to his IBM responsibilities, Dr. Jordan is able to maintain his visibility as a computational applied mathematician in the high-performance computing community. He is active on national scientific committees on science and high-perfomance computing issues and has received several awards for his work on supercomputers. His main research interests lie in the efficient use of advanced architectures computers for simulation and modeling especially in the area of systems biology. He has authored numerous papers on performance analysis of advanced computer architectures and investigated methods that exploit these architectures. Areas he has published include interactive visualization on parallel computers, parallel domain decomposition for reservoir/groundwater simulation, turbulent convection flows, parallel spectral methods, multigrid techniques and wave propagation.

Jonathan A. Neville, PSM Assistant Project Director Critical Path Institute

Jon Neville is the Assistant Project Director for ArizonaCERT at the Critical Path Institute (C-Path) in Tucson, Arizona. His responsibilities include facilitating a variety of pharmacovigilance projects. At the Arizona CERT, Mr. Neville is primarily responsible for maintenance of the International Registry for Drug-Induced Arrhythmias, which was developed to help identify underlying factors in adverse drug reactions that result in potentially fatal cardiac arrhythmias such as prolonged QT interval and Torsades de Pointes (TdP).  He received his Professional Science Masters degree in Applied BioSciences from The University of Arizona. As part of his graduate studies, Mr. Neville served as an intern at C-Path. He graduated summa cum laude with a B.S. in biology from Salisbury University in Salisbury, Maryland, where his undergraduate research in bacterial source tracking won a student research award from the National Environmental Health Association.

John Nishio is  the  director  of  the Professional Science Master's Program in environmental sciences at California State University, Chico.  He is also director of the Biocompatible Plant Research Institute, and a consultant to both organic and conventional farmers.  He recently was a project manager for the construction of Nigeria's first integrated waste management facility.  Before relocating to Chico State, Professor Nishio was at the University of Wyoming, where his laboratory made many fundamental discoveries  about  plant leaf metabolism. He holds five patents related to plant productivity.  His most recent publication reported the first intact mass proteomic analyses of thylakoids from physiologically distinct plants.  He is a dedicated and lifelong environmentalist.  He is a member of NPSMA's  membership committee. 

Dr. Nishio has interests in increasing enrollment and retention of diverse students in STEAM fields, particularly in the  environmental  sciences.  He is mentor coordinator for an NSF Applied Technology Education grant to Butte Community College (the goal is to interest community college students in science, and particularly in the PSM).  He is also a member of  the recently funded NSF proposal to San Diego State that will develop case studies on ethics that are relevant to the PSM, in his case those related to environmental sciences.  He is the founding faculty advisor to the SACNAS chapter at CSU, Chico.

Kevin Sightler, Ph.D.

Visiting Director, PSM Program
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Peiru Wu, Ph.D.

Associate Professor and Program Director
PSM in Industrial Mathematics
Department of Mathematics
Michigan State University