R. Alta Charo is the Warren P. Knowles Professor of Law and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In the past, she also has served on the faculty of the UW Masters in Biotechnology Studies program and the Dept. of Medical History and Bioethics at the School of Medicine & Public Health.

For the 2019-2020 academic year, she is on leave while a Berggruen fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Alta Charo (B.A. biology, Harvard 1979; J.D. Columbia, 1982) is an elected member (2004) of the World Technology Network and (2005) the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. In 2006 she was elected to membership in the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine (IOM) (now known as the National Academy of Medicine), and in 2013 she was awarded the Adam Yarmolinsky Medal for her service to the IOM.

Professor Charo served on President Obama’s transition team, where she was a member of the HHS review team, focusing her attention particularly on transition issues related to NIH, FDA, bioethics, stem cell policy, and women’s reproductive health. She was on leave 2009-2011 to serve as a senior policy advisor on emerging technology issues in the Office of the Commissioner at the US Food & Drug Administration.

Professor Charo offers courses on public health law, bioethics, biotechnology law, food & drug law, reproductive rights, stem cell policy, torts, and legislative drafting. In addition, she has served on the UW Hospital clinical ethics committee, the University’s Institutional Review Board for the protection of human subjects in medical research, and the University’s Bioethics Advisory Committee. She has been a visiting lecturer at law and medical schools in Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Cuba, France, Germany, and New Zealand. In 2006, she was a visiting professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law (Boalt Hall).

Prior to her arrival at UW in 1989, Professor Charo served as Associate Director of the Legislative Drafting Research Fund of Columbia University (1982-1985); Fulbright Junior Lecturer in American Law at the Sorbonne in Paris (1985-1986); legal analyst for the Biological Applications Program of the congressional Office of Technology Assessment (1986-88); and American Association for the Advancement of Science Diplomacy Fellow for the Policy Development Division of the Office of Population at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Professor Charo has authored or contributed to over 100 articles, book chapters and government reports on law and policy related to environmental protection, reproductive health, new reproductive technologies, medical genetics, stem cell research, science funding, and research ethics. She has served as a member of the boards of the Alan Guttmacher Institute and the Foundation for Genetic Medicine, the National Medical Advisory Committee of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and the program board of amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research. She has also been on the boards of the Society for the Advancement of Women’s Health and the former American Association of Bioethics, as well as the ethics advisory board of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In addition, she has served as a consultant to the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine and the former NIH Office of Protection from Research Risks.

Charo has also served on several expert advisory boards of organizations with an interest in stem cell research, including CuresNow, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, the International Society for Stem Cell Research and WiCell, as well as on the advisory board to the Wisconsin Stem Cell Research Program. From 2005-2009 she was a member of the ethics standards working group of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Also in 2005, she helped to draft the National Academies’ Guidelines for Embryonic Stem Cell Research, and in 2006 she was appointed to co-chair the National Academies’ Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research Advisory Committee. Later she chaired a workshop on the growing problem of misleading advertising and patient endangerment by unscrupulous clinics purporting to offer stem cell therapy.

Charo’s advisory committee service for the federal government includes the 1994 NIH Human Embryo Research Panel, and (1996-2001) President Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission where she participated in drafting its reports on “Cloning Human Beings”(1997); “Research Involving Persons with Mental Disorders that May Affect Decisionmaking Capacity”(1998); “Research Involving Human Biological Materials: Ethical Issues and Policy Guidance”(1999); “Ethical Issues in Human Stem Cell Research”(1999); “Ethical and Policy Issues in International Research: Clinical Trials in Developing Countries” (2001); and “Ethical and Policy Issues in Research Involving Human Participants” (2001).

At the National Academies, Professor Charo is a member of the IOM Council, the Board on Health Sciences Policy, and the Committee on Science, Technology and Law. From 2001-2008 she was a member of the Board on Life Sciences. She served as its liaison to the Committee on Research Standards and Practices to Prevent Destructive Applications of Biotechnology and co-chaired its committee to develop national voluntary guidelines for stem cell research. She also served from 2006 to 2013 as a member of the Institute of Medicine’s Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice as well as its Committee on Smallpox Vaccination Program Implementation and its committee to review the FDA and the U.S. national system for the assurance of drug safety.

Professor Charo also has completed service as a member of a working group of the NIH Council of Councils, reviewing the use of chimpanzees in NIH-funded research, an IOM committee reviewing the current pediatric vaccine schedule, an NAS committee updating the code of responsible conduct of science, an IOM committee on the use of mitochondrial replacement techniques, and on the advisory council for the NIH National Center for the Advancement of Translational Sciences.

From 2015 to 2017, she was a member of the National Academies’ Human Gene Editing Initiative and co-chaired its committee charged with making recommendations on the use of gene-editing for both somatic and germline (heritable) changes in humans. She also was co-founder and then co-chair of the NAS/NAM Forum on Regenerative Medicine, served on the Program Board of the Greenwall Foundation and was a witness for the congressional panel looking at the practice of fetal tissue research. At present she is a member of the World Health Organization’s expert advisory committee on global governance of genome editing.

Ms. Charo was born in Brooklyn, NY. She is fond of poker, foreign language study, cats, home renovation, Harry Potter books, old movies, roller coasters, salsa music, Jane Austen novels and Star Trek.

Magalie Guilhabert holds a Master in Biology (minor Plant Breeding) from the University of Rennes, France, and a PhD in Plant Pathology from the University of California, Davis, US. Her research includes Plant-Microbe Interactions and Microbial Molecular Signaling. She performed post-doctoral work at the United States Department of Agriculture, Albany, CA, in the Produce Safety and Microbiology Research Group.

Magalie has more than 13 years’ experience in different R&D positions in the CropScience Industry with Bayer and legacy companies. Recently, she served as the Director, Head of Crop Efficiency and Seed Growth at Bayer CropScience, where her responsibilities included the identification and development of microbial solutions for seed treatment of row crops.

Since November 2018 Magalie has headed the R&D activities to drive the identification and optimization of differentiating, efficacious and safe new active ingredients. She is also member of the Biologics R&D leadership team of Bayer CropScience. She is currently located at the Biologics Bayer CropScience Site in West Sacramento, CA.

Magalie is an advocate for public/private partnership and has been for example member of the Board of directors of the International Alliance for Phytobiome Research, an industry-academic collaborative initiative focused on building a phytobiome-based foundation for accelerating the sustainable production of food, feed, and fiber. She has also recently been a public member in the University of California Davis Biological Safety Administrative Advisory Committee, US. Magalie is an inventor on several issued patents and has published her work in peer-reviewed journals including Journal of Bacteriology, Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions, Molecular Microbiology and PLoS.

As an early pioneer in the high-throughput synthesis and sequencing of DNA, Dr. Leproust is disrupting the process of gene synthesis to enable the exponential growth of synthetic biology applications in multiple fields including medicine, DNA data storage, agricultural biology, and industrial chemicals. In 2015, she was named one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers for fast-tracking the building blocks of life, and Fast Company named her one of the most creative people in business for synthesizing DNA faster than ever. Prior to Twist Bioscience, she held escalating positions at Agilent Technologies where she architected the successful SureSelect product line that lowered the cost of sequencing and elucidated mechanisms responsible for dozens of Mendelian diseases. She also developed the Oligo Library Synthesis technology, where she initiated and led product and business development activities for the team. Dr. Leproust designed and developed multiple commercial synthesis platforms to streamline microarray manufacturing and fabrication. Prior to Agilent, she worked with Dr. X. Gao at the University of Houston developing DNA and RNA parallel synthesis processes on solid support, a project developed commercially by Xeotron Corporation. Dr. Leproust has published over 30 peer-reviewed papers—many on applications of synthetic DNA, and is the author of numerous patents. She earned her Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Houston and her M.Sc. in industrial chemistry from the Lyon School of Industrial Chemistry in France.

In his role as Assistant Secretary for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Daniel Simmons leads EERE to promote affordable and reliable energy to enhance America’s economic growth and energy security. He oversees technology development in the energy efficiency, renewable power and sustainable transportation sectors.

Before joining the U.S. Department of Energy, Daniel served as the Institute for Energy Research’s Vice President for Policy, overseeing its energy and climate policy work at the state and federal level.

He previously served as the director of the Natural Resources Task Force of the American Legislative Exchange Council, was a research fellow at the Mercatus Center and worked as professional staff on the Committee on Resources of the U.S. House of Representatives.

He is a graduate of Utah State University and George Mason University School of Law.

Dr. Chris Fall serves as Director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the lead federal agency supporting fundamental scientific research for energy and the nation’s largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences. He oversees the Office’s two principal thrusts: direct support of scientific research, and development, construction, and operation of unique, open-access scientific user facilities that are made available to external researchers. The Office of Science also is responsible for stewardship of 10 of the Department’s 17 national laboratories.

Before joining the Office of Science, Fall served as a Senior Advisor to the Undersecretary for Energy and as Acting Director of DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). Fall came to DOE from the Office of Naval Research (ONR), where he served for more than seven years in a variety of roles including Acting Chief Scientist and Lead for the Research Directorate, Deputy Director of Research, Director of the International Liaison Office, and the ONR Innovation Fellow. While on loan from ONR, Fall served for three years in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as Assistant Director for Defense Programs and then as Acting Lead for the National Security and International Affairs Division. Before government service, Fall was a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and he completed postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California at Davis Institute for Theoretical Dynamics and the New York University Center for Neural Science.

Fall earned a Ph.D. in Neuroscience and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Virginia. He also holds an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

The Honorable Paul M. Dabbar, Under Secretary for Science, serves as the Department’s principal advisor on fundamental energy research, energy technologies, and science, driving this mission through programs including nuclear and high energy particle physics, basic energy, advanced computing, fusion, and biological and environmental research, and direct management over a majority of the Department’s national labs and their world-leading user facilities. In addition, Mr. Dabbar manages the environmental and legacy management missions of the Department, addressing the U.S. legacy of nuclear weapons production and government-sponsored nuclear energy research. In addition, Mr. Dabbar is the lead for technology commercialization activities for the Department and its 17 national labs.

Prior to confirmation as Under Secretary for Science, Mr. Dabbar worked in operations, finance, and strategy roles in the energy sector. As a Managing Director at J.P. Morgan, leading various energy business areas, he has over $400 billion in investment experience across all energy sectors including solar, wind, geothermal, distributed-generation, utility, LNG, pipeline, oil & gas, trading, and energy technologies, and has also led the majority of all nuclear transactions. In addition, he had a senior leadership role for the company’s commodity trading business, including power, oil and gas.

Before joining J.P. Morgan, Mr. Dabbar served as a nuclear submarine officer in Mare Island, California, and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, including deploying to the North Pole where he conducted environmental research. He also served on the Department of Energy Environmental Management Advisory Board. He has been a lecturer at the U.S. Naval Academy, and conducted research at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Mr. Dabbar received a B.S. degree from the U.S. Naval Academy, and a masters degree from Columbia University. Mr. Dabbar and his wife, Andrea, are the parents of two children.