PROGRAM AND ADVISORY COMMITTEES

Sonya T. Smith

Chair of the Program Committee and Advisory Committee
Sigma Xi President-Elect

Affiliation: Howard University 

Sonya T. Smith joined the Howard University faculty in 1995 and is the first tenured female faculty member in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Smith obtained her PhD in mechanical and aerospace engineering from The University of Virginia in 1995 and was also the first African-American woman to do so. In 2010 she became the first woman promoted to the highest academic rank of Professor (full) in this department and the following year, 2011, became the first women appointed as Mechanical Engineering Department Chair at Howard University.

She has established an interdisciplinary theoretical and computational research laboratory entitled the Applied Fluids-Thermal Research Laboratory. She has received support for her research from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Department of Defense, and industry. 

Advisory Committee

The following people are partners and collaborators of the 2020 Annual Meeting and Student Research Conference. 

Darcy J. Gentleman 

Affiliation: DJG Communications LLC

Darcy J. Gentleman, PhD, has 15+ years of professional communications experience (http://audiencesfirst.com/). He has coached 170+ speakers and run self-designed workshops for 500+ presenters across the academic, governmental, and private sectors including: the American Geophysical Union, Arizona State University, the Cancer Prevention and Control Research Network, the National Academy of Sciences, Purdue University, the Smithsonian Institution, Sigma Xi, and the State University of New York.

At the American Chemical Society for nearly a decade, Darcy organized 55 congressional policy briefings, developed a communications contest for younger scientists including engagement at science museums, contributed to a YouTube series popularizing chemistry, and was the managing editor for Environmental Science & Technology and the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

In October 2019, Darcy became a member of the executive team for a startup Science Communications Training Network building on formative work by the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science and COMPASS. Darcy is an alumnus of The Banff Centre’s Science Communications program (2008) and attended the Summer Institute at The Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science (2014). He has a PhD and MS in analytical chemistry from Arizona State University (2003, 2001), funded by NASA’s astrobiology program, and an Honorary BSc in planetary science and also chemistry from the University of Toronto (1999). Darcy teaches science communications as an adjunct professor at George Washington University. 

Juliet King

Bill O'Brien

Bill O’Brien is the senior advisor for Program Innovation at the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a senior executive at the National Endowment responsible for exploring, examining, and identifying innovative and/or emerging practices, programs, and endeavors in the arts. O’Brien helped organize two convenings of the nation’s leading artists and scientists in partnership with the National Science Foundation: Re/search: Art, Science and Information Technology and Symbiotic Art & Science: An Investigation at the Intersection of Life Sciences and the Arts. He helps lead an NEA/NSF/NEH working group to investigate research, practice and innovation at the intersection of art, science, and the humanities, and serves as project director on a partnership between the NEA and the Department of Defense to investigate the use of Creative Arts Therapies as a formal medical protocol to help heal service members at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence (NICoE) at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. 

JD Talasek 

Affiliation: National Academy of Sciences

In his eleven years in the office of Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences, JD Talasek has directed the planning curating, design, and installation of exhibits in rotating gallery spaces and permanent space. Exhibits that he has organized have also traveled including one that was supported by the Smithsonian Institution’s Traveling Exhibit Program. To support these exhibits, he has been responsible for programming for public and academic engagement. Such projects include monthly community salons that explore the connection between disciplines in order to engage the public with issues in both the sciences and humanities. He has served as the moderator as well as the organizer for these salons, called DASER (DC Art Science Evening Rendezvous) with a very high community response. He has organized two online symposia, partnering with universities and other institutions to utilize available technologies.

Program Committee

The following Sigma Xi members are leading the program for the 2020 Annual Meeting and Student Research Conference. 

Cristina Gouin

Affiliation: District of Columbia Sigma Xi Chapter

She has both an M.S. and B.S. from University of Maryland in horticultural research and grew up doing research with her father, Dr. Francis Gouin of the Sigma Xi University of Maryland Chapter. She was indoctrinated into Sigma Xi in 1999 as an associate member and was elected vice president of the District of Columbia Chapter all at one sentence. In 2002, she was elected president of the chapter and have remained as president ever since, re-elected by members. During her tenure with the DC Chapter, she has organized or helped to organized two to three traditional chapter dinner lectures each year for the chapter. They also co-sponsored meetings with other regional chapters.

Rebecca M. Jones

Affiliation: George Mason University Chapter

Rebecca M. Jones earned a PhD in inorganic chemistry from the University of Cincinnati and is currently an associate professor of chemistry at George Mason University. She is an administrative leader in the STEM Accelerator, serving as principal investigator for the National Science Foundation-funded Rural and Diverse Student Scholars Program and chair of the College of Science Undergraduate Research Colloquium. Her research interests include improving recruitment, persistence, and retention in STEM education, photographic chemistry, and student and faculty development related to undergraduate research experiences.

Her career includes multiple nominations for teaching excellence awards and she has implemented multiple creative, active learning activities and classes to improve student outcomes. Jones is an active member of the American Chemical Society, an elected chemistry councilor on the Council on Undergraduate Research, issue editor for the journal Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research, and president of the George Mason University Chapter of Sigma Xi.

Vicente Notario

Affiliation: Georgetown University Chapter

Vicente Notario received his PhD degree in biology from the University of Salamanca, Spain. After receiving post-doctoral training at Cambridge University, England, and the U.S. National Cancer Institute, he joined the Georgetown University Medical Center, where is currently a professor of radiation medicine and of biochemistry and molecular & cellular biology. His research focuses on understanding molecular and cellular mechanisms involved in cancer initiation and progression, and in the acquisition of anti-cancer therapy resistance. He has led the Radiation Biology, Molecular Targets and Therapeutic Resistance, and Molecular Oncology basic research programs at the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. He has authored over 150 publications, and has been continuously funded for 30 years by the U.S. National Cancer Institute. He has delivered many guest lectures at national and international institutions, was invited frequently to participate in U.S. and international scientific review and advisory committees, and was invited to be an ad hoc reviewer for over 85 scientific journals. He currently teaches medical and graduate courses on biochemistry, histology, molecular biology, radiation biology, molecular carcinogenesis, tumor biology and cancer epigenetics.

Timothy Ng 

Affiliation: University of Maryland Chapter

Art Poland

Affiliation: George Mason University Chapter

Art Poland graduated with honors in astronomy from the University of Massachusetts in 1964. After receiving his PhD degree in astrophysics from Indiana University in 1969, he joined the staff at the High Altitude Observatory (HAO) of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. There he worked on problems of energy balance and non-local thermodynamic equilibrium (non-LTE) in the solar atmosphere. He also joined the HAO Skylab team to work on the White Light Coronagraph experiment. He joined the GSFC research team in 1980 and worked on the UVSP experiment on the Solar Maximum Mission. In 1986 he became the U.S. project scientist for the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. From 1999 to 2003 he was the senior project scientist for the Living With A Star Program, which is designed to study and understand the impacts of the Sun on Earth Systems. He is currently a research professor in the department of Physics and Astronomy at George Mason University working on space weather.

Sigma Xi Staff

Eman Ghanem

eghanem@sigmaxi.org
Staff Liaison
Affiliation: Sigma Xi 

Eman Ghanem is the director of Membership, Chapters, and Programs at Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society. Prior to Sigma Xi, she was the co-director of Student and External Relations for the Freshman Research Initiative at The University of Texas–Austin, where she also served as the research educator for the Supramolecular Sensors Stream. Ghanem holds a PhD in biochemistry from Texas A&M University. 

 Jamie L. Vernon