PROGRAM

Freeman Hrabowski III, PhD

President Emeritus, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

https://president.umbc.edu/freeman-hrabowski/ 

Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, President Emeritus of UMBC (The University of Maryland, Baltimore County) served as president from 1992 to 2022. His research and publications focus on science and math education, with special emphasis on minority participation and performance. He chaired the National Academies’ committee that produced the 2011 report, Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation:America’s Science and Technology Talent at the Crossroads. He was named in 2012 by President Obama to chair the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans. His 2013 TED talk highlights the “Four Pillars of College Success in Science.”  In 2022, Dr. Hrabowski was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and he was also named the inaugural ACE Centennial Fellow, to be served upon his retirement from UMBC. In Addition, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) also launched the Freeman Hrabowski Scholars Program ($1.5 billion) to help build a scientific workforce that more fully reflects our increasingly diverse country. In October 2022, he was named the inaugural Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture Speaker by Harvard. In April 2023, The National Academy of Sciences awarded him the Public Welfare Medal, the Academy’s most prestigious award, and inducted him as a member of the academy, for his extraordinary use of science for the public good.

Huda Zoghbi, MD

Distinguished Service Professor, Baylor College of Medicine

Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Director, Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute

https://www.bcm.edu/people-search/huda-zoghbi-33774

Dr. Huda Zoghbi is a clinician-scientist who studies the molecular mechanisms of neurodevelopment and neurodegeneration. She was born in Lebanon and attended the American University of Beirut until 1976, when civil war broke out. She moved to the United States to continue medical school.

Zoghbi graduated from Meharry Medical College in Nashville in 1979. She completed her training in pediatric neurology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and then joined the laboratory of Art Beaudet for a postdoctoral fellowship in molecular genetics. In 1985, she established her own research laboratory focused on identifying the genes and mechanisms underlying brain development and degeneration. Today, Zoghbi is Professor of Molecular and Human Genetics,  Pediatrics, Neurology, and Neuroscience at Baylor, Director of the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children’s Hospital, and a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator.

Dr. Zoghbi's interests range from neurodevelopment to neurodegeneration.  Her discovery (with Harry Orr) that Spinocerebellar Ataxia type 1 is caused by expansion of a polyglutamine tract and her subsequent studies that such expansion leads to accumulation of the mutant protein in neurons has had profound ramifications since many late-onset neurological disorders involve similar accumulations of disease-driving proteins. Dr. Zoghbi’s work in neurodevelopment led to the discovery of the gene Math1/Atoh1 and to showing that it governs the development of several components of the proprioceptive, balance, hearing, vestibular, and breathing pathways.Dr. Zoghbi’s group also discovered that mutations in MECP2 cause the postnatal neurological disorder Rett syndrome and revealed the importance of this gene for various neuropsychiatric features. Dr. Zoghbi has trained over 90 scientists and physician-scientists and is a member of several professional organizations and boards. She has received numerous other honors and awards, including the Vilcek Prize for Biomedical Research (2009), Gruber Prize in Neuroscience (2011), Breakthrough Prize in Life Science (2017) and the Brain Prize (2020). She is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Inventors. She also holds the National Order of the Cedar, Lebanon.