Evelynn Hammonds, Chair, Task Force on Women Faculty

Evelynn M. Hammonds is Professor of the History of Science and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Before joining the faculty at Harvard, she was Professor of the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she was the founding director of the MIT Center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology, and Medicine. She has also been a Visiting professor at UCLA and Hampshire College. Professor Hammonds received a B.S. in physics from Spelman College, a B.E.E. in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, a S.M. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in the history of science from Harvard University. Hammonds is the author of Childhood’s Deadly Scourge: The Campaign to Control Diphtheria in New York City, 1880-1930 (1999) and co-author with Barbara Laslett, Sally G. Kohlstedt, and Helen Longino, Gender and Scientific Authority (1996). She has published articles on the history of disease, race, gender and science, African American feminism, and African American women and the epidemic of HIV/AIDS. Prof. Hammonds was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Spelman College in 2004. She was named a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer by Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society (2003-2004). Hammonds has been a Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and a Fellow in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Prof. Hammonds serves on the Board of Trustees of Bennett College, a historically black college for women in Greensboro, North Carolina. At Harvard she is Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of African and African American Studies and she serves on the Standing Committee on Women and the Committee on General Education.

Barbara Grosz, Chair, Task Force on Women in Science and Engineering

Barbara J. Grosz is Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Dean of Science of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Before joining the faculty at Harvard, she was Director of the Natural Language program at SRI International and co-founder of the Center for the Study of Language and Information. Professor Grosz is the author of several influential papers in discourse processing and in collaborative systems. She developed some of the earliest and most influential computer dialogue systems and established the research field of computational modeling of discourse. Her work on models of collaboration helped establish that field of inquiry. With her colleagues at Harvard, Grosz has developed several collaborative interfaces for human-computer communication. She has been elected to the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, recipient of the UC Berkeley Computer Science and Engineering Distinguished Alumna Award and of awards for distinguished service from major AI societies, she is also widely respected for her contributions to the advancement of women in science. She chaired the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Standing Committee on the Status of Women when it produced the report, Women in Science at Harvard; Part I: Junior Faculty and Graduate Students in 1991. She was Interim Associate Dean for Affirmative Action at Harvard in 1993-94 and served on the FAS Ad Hoc Committee on Faculty Diversity from 1998-2001 and the Standing Committee on Women from 1988-95 and again in 1999.

Drew Faust, ex officio (both Task Forces)

Drew Gilpin Faust is the Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and Lincoln Professor of History. A leading historian of the Civil War and of the American South, Faust is the author of five books, including Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, for which she won the Francis Parkman Prize in 1997. Faust spent most of her academic career at the University of Pennsylvania, rising through the professorial ranks after receiving her Ph.D. there in 1975. Faust came to Harvard as the founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute in 2001. She is a trustee of Bryn Mawr College, of the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and of the National Humanities Center. She has also been elected to the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Steven Hyman, Guest (both Task Forces)

Steven E. Hyman, MD assumed the role of Provost of Harvard University in December, 2001 and also serves as Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Hyman was Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Director of Psychiatry Research at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1992 until he left for NIMH in 1996. He also taught neurobiology at Harvard Medical School both to medical and graduate students and was the first faculty Director of Harvard University's Interfaculty Initiative in Mind, Brain, and Behavior from 1994 to 1996. Dr. Hyman returned to Harvard after serving as the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 1996 to 2001. He has authored more than 100 research articles and reviews and has coauthored several widely used basic and clinical textbooks, the most recent being Molecular Neuropharmacology: Foundation for Clinical Neuroscience (2001). Among his honors, Dr. Hyman is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the Society for Neuroscience, the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology and the American College of Psychiatrists. He has served on scientific advisory boards nationally and internationally including the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Riken Brain Sciences Institute in Japan, and the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Germany.