ALICE S. HUANG

Dr. Huang is Senior Councilor for External Relations and Faculty Associate in Biology at the California Institute of Technology. She sits on the Boards of AAAS, Johns Hopkins University, and the Health Effects Institute. She is, also, Chair of the Foundation for Microbiology and Chair of the Scientific Board of the Institute for Molecular and Cell Biology in Singapore. She is a member of the Food and Drug Administration Advisory Committee on Vaccines and Related Biological Products. She was previously Dean for Science at New York University and prior to that Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Harvard Medical School.

Born in China, she grew up in the United States attending St. Mary's Hall, Burlington, NJ, the National Cathedral School, Washington, DC, and Wellesley College. She received B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees (microbiology, 1966) from Johns Hopkins University. As a graduate student she was the first to purify and characterize defective interfering (DI) viral particles. Her postulate that these mutants play a major role in viral pathogenesis stimulated work on many viral systems and currently provides an important avenue for controlling diseases especially of plants. Her postdoctoral work at the Salk Institute with David Baltimore on vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) led to a later discovery of theirs at MIT of the VSV virion-associated RNA-dependent RNA polymerase which led the way to David Baltimore's discovery of reverse transcriptase.

Dr. Huang was appointed Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Harvard Medical School in 1971 and became full Professor in 1979. During that time she also served as coordinator of the Virology Unit at the Channing Laboratories of Infectious Diseases at Boston City Hospital for two years and Director of the training program funded by the National Cancer Institute on "Virus-Host Interactions in Cancer" for fifteen years. Her research focused on the molecular characterization of VSV: its viral RNA species and regulatory mechanisms during replication. She was the first to demonstrate that RNA and DNA enveloped viruses, including HIV and HSV, phenotypically mix their surface glycoproteins resulting in alterations of antigenicity and host range.

In 1979 Dr. Huang became the Director of the Laboratories of Infectious Diseases at Children's Hospital in Boston. There she established a unit working on viral diseases of pediatric patients under a Rockefeller Foundation Geographic Medicine Center Grant. She also initiated an AIDS unit which became the second NIH pediatric Clinical Trials Group.

Dr. Huang has been recognized by the American Society for Microbiology with the Eli Lilly Award in Immunology and Microbiology (1977) followed by election to that Society's President in 1988-1989. She has honorary doctorates of science from Wheaton College, Mt. Holyoke College, and the Medical College of Pennsylvania. She served on the Board of Trustees of UMass and Shady Hill School. She is a fellow of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan (1991) and of American Women in Science (1998).

As an administrator Dr. Huang is particularly interested in education, in career mentoring, and in policy issues related to science and technology. Since coming to Caltech, where her husband David Baltimore is the President, Dr. Huang has joined the Pasadena League of Women Voters, the Board of the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences, and the Pacific Council on International Policy.

Dr. Huang resides in Pasadena, California, and has one daughter in New York City.

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