Center Conference

Ambika Bumb, PhD
Deputy Executive Director of the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense

An entrepreneur with background in nanomedicine, Dr. Ambika Bumb’s professional path has bridged academia, industry, and government. She served as President Biden’s Deputy Executive Director of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), the sole body of advisors from outside the federal government charged with making recommendations to the President and Vice President on policy affecting science and technology, as well as on matters involving scientific and technological information that is needed to inform public policy relating to the economy, public health, worker empowerment, education, energy, the environment, security, racial equity, and other topics. She previously was the Health, Science, and Technology Advisor for Department of State’s Crisis Management and Strategy within the Office of the Secretary where while working on the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Bumb and her team were awarded the Distinguished Honor Award for exceptionally outstanding service or achievements of marked national or international significance. The Senate unanimously passed the bipartisan Resolution 567 commending the efforts of her team in bringing home more than 100,000 citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic, the largest repatriation effort in U.S. history. During the rise of the pandemic, she was an advisor for HelpwithCOVID, a grassroots clearing house that matched 17,300+ community volunteers with 850+ projects focused on providing COIVD relief.

Dr. Bumb has served in the roles of Board Member for the International Biomedical Research Alliance, Strategic Advisor to the Energy Sciences Area of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and CEO of the biotech Bikanta. She graduated from Georgia Tech with a B.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering and a Minor in Economics, while being recognized with the Helen E. Grenga Outstanding Woman Engineer and E. Jo Baker President’s Scholar Awards. She then obtained her doctorate in medical engineering from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-Oxford Program while also on the prestigious Marshall Scholarship and followed that up with two post-doctoral fellowships at the National Cancer Institute and National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. The NIH recognized her post-doctoral work with the Orloff Technical Advance Award as a “platform” technology with implications that will broadly advance medicine on multiple fronts. Her work has led to 16 patents and the spinout of the biotech Bikanta that used nanodiamonds to allow academics and doctors to study and address disease like cancer at the cellular level. She has received much recognition for excellence in engineering and named as one of 40 under 40 influential Bay Area business leaders. An American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow, Dr. Bumb has also been involved in science outreach/education and national policy initiatives, such as the National Nanotech Initiative, Nano Task Force, guest writing for Techcrunch and Cancer Moonshot Initiative.

https://biodefensecommission.org/teams/ambika-bumb-phd/
 

Judith Mitrani-Reiser (Fed)
Associate Chief of the Materials and Structural Systems Division

Dr. Judith Mitrani-Reiser is the Associate Chief of the Materials and Structural Systems Division (Engineering Laboratory) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The Division includes four research groups: Community Resilience, Earthquake Engineering, Structures, and Infrastructure Materials. The Division also houses three statutory programs: National Construction Safety Team (NCST), National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP), and the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program (NWIRP). Mitrani-Reiser provides leadership in the development and coordination of statutory processes for making buildings safer as authorized by various statutes, including the NCST, NWIR, and NEHR Acts. She manages and provides oversight on building failure investigations and coordinates work with other Federal agencies to reduce losses in the United States from disasters and failures of our built environment.

Mitrani-Reiser is a member of the National Construction Safety Team for the Technical Investigation of Hurricane Maria’s Impacts on Puerto Rico and serves as the leader of the NCST project focused on characterizing the technical conditions associated with deaths and injuries. The objective of this project is to better understand how damaged buildings and supporting infrastructure played a role in the injuries and deaths associated with Hurricane Maria. In order to recommend changes to or the establishment of evacuation and emergency response procedures and for improvements to building standards, codes, and practice, scientifically rigorous methods are required for: (1) attributing morbidity and mortality to windstorms (directly and indirectly), (2) examining the health impact associated with building and building system failures in windstorms, and (3) developing a process to integrate epidemiology and engineering methodologies and tools that better determine the risk factors of and predict life loss due to failures in the built environment.

Prior to accepting her new position, Mitrani-Reiser served as the Director of the Disasters and Failure Studies Program (Engineering Laboratory) at NIST. As DFS Director, she led a multidisciplinary staff responsible for conducting fact-finding investigations focused on: building and infrastructure failures; successful building and infrastructure performance; evacuation and emergency response systems; and disaster recovery and community resilience. Mitrani-Reiser earned her B.S. from the University of Florida, M.S. from the University of California at Berkeley, and Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology. Mitrani-Reiser is currently a member and a Director of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI), a member of the Executive Committee and Expert Panel of CROSS-US (a confidential reporting system established to capture and share lessons learned from structural safety issues), and a member of FEMA’s Nationwide Building Code Losses Avoided Study Independent Review Panel. She is also a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), where she co-founded SEI’s Committee on Multi-Hazard Mitigation.

https://www.nist.gov/people/judith-mitrani-reiser