WHRC Director-Elect John P. Holdren Named President-Elect of AAAS

More information about the AAAS from their website.
Dr. John P. Holdren

Dr. John P. Holdren

John P. Holdren, director-elect of The Woods Hole Research Center, has been named President-Elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He will assume that position at the February 2005 AAAS Annual Meeting.

Dr. Holdren has been Visiting Distinguished Scientist at the Center since January 1991 and a trustee since 1999. He is Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy and Director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy at the Kennedy School, as well as Professor of Environmental Science and Public Policy in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. He previously co-founded and co-led for 23 years the campus-wide interdisciplinary graduate degree program in energy and resources at the University of California at Berkeley. Trained in engineering and theoretical plasma physics at MIT and Stanford, Holdren focuses his research interests on fusion energy technology, energy and resource options in industrial and developing countries, global environmental problems, impacts of human population growth, and international security. He is a former MacArthur Prize Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1995 he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the Pugwash conferences, for which he serves as chair of the executive committee.

The AAAS is the world's largest general scientific society. It has 142,000 individual and institutional members, and the membership of the affiliated organizations totals 10 million. Its journal, SCIENCE, is the largest-circulation general scientific journal in the world, with an estimated readership of 1 million.

A Board of Directors elected by the membership governs the organization. The President-Elect serves for one year in that capacity, then for a year as President, then for a year as Chairman of the Board.

The current President-Elect, who will become President in February, is Gilbert Omenn, head of the University of Michigan Health System. The current President, who becomes Chair of the Board, is Shirley Ann Jackson, President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.