Boston, MA
Thursday, September 16, 2010

	WELCOME and INTRODUCTION: Robert A. Brown, a distinguished scholar of chemical engineering and an innovative leader in higher education, became the tenth president of Boston University in September 2005. He has been a Fellow of the American Academy since 1994. During his tenure at Boston University, Brown has emphasized the strengthening of undergraduate education, graduate and professional education, interdisciplinary work, and research and scholarship across the university. He initiated an institutional planning process that identified ten-year goals to establish Boston University as one of the great large private research universities in the world. Before coming to Boston University, he held a number of leadership positions at MIT. Brown is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, among other professional societies. He has served on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and is currently a Director of the DuPont Company and a Trustee of the Aalto University Foundation in Finland and the Universities Research Association. Brown is Chairman of the Academic Research Council of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Singapore, a key funding body for academic research in that country, and serves on the board of Singapore’s National Research Foundation.
	Leslie Berlowitz is President and William T. Golden Chair at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy in 2004. Berlowitz is responsible for the intellectual vision and day-to-day management of the Academy and oversees its five research areas: science and technology policy; global security; social policy and American institutions; the humanities and culture; and education. During her tenure at the Academy, Berlowitz has greatly expanded the scope and size of the Academy’s research programs, increased the number of publications, and established new collaborative relationships with other leading intellectual institutions through joint programming, events, and publications. Audio | Video (8 min.)
	SPEAKER: Jonathan R. Cole is the John Mitchell Mason Professor at Columbia University. He has been a Fellow of the American Academy since 1992. After two years as Vice President for Arts and Sciences at Columbia, he was named Provost in 1989 and served as Provost and Dean of Faculties from 1994 until 2003. With Robert Merton, Harriet Zuckerman, and Stephen Cole, Cole started Columbia’s Program in the Sociology of Science with support from the National Science Foundation. He subsequently worked on the peer review system in the sciences. In recent years, he has worked on issues in higher education, particularly problems facing American research universities, and on questions of scientific and technological literacy and intellectual property in new digital media. His book The Great American University was published in 2010. He is a National Associate of the United States National Academies of Science; a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and a member of the American Philosophical Society. He has been honored twice by the government of Italy, as Ufficiale in 1994 and, in 2003, as Commendatore of the Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana for his work in creating the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America. Audio | Video (60 min.)