Institute for Defense Analyses

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Mr. Elliott was appointed Lead Director of Checkpoint Systems, Inc. in August 2002. He served as Chairman of the Board of Checkpoint from May 2002 to August 2002. Mr. Elliott is the retired Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Hercules Inc. From 1991 to April 2000, he served Hercules as Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; President and Chief Operating Officer; President and Chief Executive Officer; Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Chairman of the Board of Directors. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Wilmington Trust Company, and the Institute for Defense Analyses.

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Dr. Mesirov is chief informatics officer of the Broad Institute where she directs the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Organization. She is also adjunct professor of bioinformatics at Boston University. Dr. Mesirov is a computational scientist who has spent many years working in the area of high-performance computing on problems that arise in science, engineering and business applications. Her current research interest is computational biology with a focus on algorithms and analytic methodologies for pattern recognition and discovery with applications to cancer genomics, genome analysis and interpretation, and comparative genomics. In addition, Mesirov is committed to the development of practical, accessible software tools to bring these methods to the general biomedical research community. In 1997, Dr. Mesirov came to the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, now part of the Broad Institute, from IBM, where she was manager of computational biology and bioinformatics in the Healthcare/Pharmaceutical Solutions Organization. Before joining IBM in 1995, she was director of research at Thinking Machines Corporation for 10 years. She has also held positions in the mathematics department at the University of California at Berkeley, the Institute for Defense Analyses' Center for Communications Research in Princeton, and as associate executive director of the American Mathematical Society. Dr. Mesirov is a trustee of the Institute for Defense Analyses, a member of review committees for the Department of Energy's Argonne, Livermore, and Los Alamos National Laboratories, the Board of Directors of the International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB), and the National Research Council's Board of Mathematical Sciences and its Applications. She has also served as a member of the Biology and Environmental Research Advisory Committee of the Department of Energy, president of the Association for Women in Mathematics, trustee of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, trustee of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California, and chair of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and serves on numerous academic and corporate scientific advisory and journal editorial boards. Dr. Mesirov received her A.B. from the University of Pennsylvania in mathematics and Ph.D. in mathematics from Brandeis University.

Biographical Info: I graduated from Carnegie-Mellon University with a degree in mathematics and worked for Westinghouse Electric for several years before attending graduate school. I have an MBA from Duquesne University. I met my husband, Elliott, at Carnegie-Mellon and we were married in 1970. Our first home was at the Bryn Mawr Apartments with several other Peabody grads as neighbors, and our second Pittsburgh home was on Kelly Avenue in Wilkensburg. Again, Peabody grads were our neighbors. We moved to Northern Virginia in 1974 and have lived in Annandale since 1978. Elliot is a research staff member with the Institute for Defense Analyses and I am a tax specialist and Senior Business Analyst for Aiken and Company, a CPA firm. I am also the manager of the Fairfax office of ValutionOne, LLC. We are again fortunate to have Peabody grads as good friends. My best friend, Karen Weiss Kaufman, was a 1969 Peabody grad and my brother Ken Wiseman and his family live nearby in Chevy Chase, MD. Both of our daughters graduated from the University of Virginia. Elena and her family live in Falls Church, VA. Elena is a CPA and is the controller and acting CFO for the American College of Radiology. Her husband is a technical recruiter and they have given us a terrific granddaughter, Mackensie. Our daughter Rachel, is a PhD candidate in business economics at Harvard University. Elliott and I are looking forward to downsizing to a condo in the fall of 2006. We still enjoy playing bridge and antiquing.