Joan N. Gardner, Chair
Joan Gardner is president of Gardner Associates. She recently was director of the University of Massachusetts–Boston GIS Core Research Facility. Prior to joining the university, she was the chairman, president and treasurer of Applied Geographics, Inc., an award winning GIS consulting firm. She was an elected official in her community for nine years and served on the finance committee. She served as president of the Massachusetts Selectman’s Association. Gardner initiated and oversaw the feasibility study for MassGIS, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ statewide geographic information system.

Gardner is chair of the Environmental Business Council of New England. She has also served on the U.S. Department of Commerce Environmental Technology Trade Advisory Committee and is a past president of the New England Chapter of GITA, or the Geospatial Information & Technology Association. She is a member of the ESRI Health Users Group, the UMass Boston Science Advisory Committee, and the Massachusetts Geographic Information Advisory Council. Gardner has been elected to the Board of Directors for the James W. Sewall Company in Old Town, Maine.

Samuel D. Bader, PhD
Samuel Bader is an Argonne Distinguished Fellow, group leader of the Nanomagnetism Group and associate division director of the Materials Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory. He also serves as chief scientific of Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials. He has participated in materials research initiatives sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Office of Naval Research. He is coauthor of more than 350 publications.

In 1992 Dr. Bader was co-recipient of the Department of Energy’s Basic Energy Sciences Award for Outstanding Achievement in Solid State Physics for work on coupled magnetic layers. In 2001 he received the AVS John A. Thornton Memorial Award, cited for “seminal contributions to the atomic-level understanding of surface and thin film magnetism.” He received the American Physical Society David Adler Lectureship Award in Materials Physics in 2007.

In 2002 Dr. Bader was made an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois and a senior fellow of the University of Chicago–Argonne Consortium for Nanoscience Research. He has also been appointed an adjunct professor at Northwestern University in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Dr. Bader is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials and associate editor of Applied Physics Letters. He chaired the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Advanced Light Source at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 2002 to 2006. He is the U.S. representative and secretary of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics Commission 10 on Solid State Physics and is a member of the decadal study committee in condensed matter and materials physics (CMMP 2010) of the National Research Council and the National Academies.

Vernal H. Branch
Vernal Branch is a member of the Virginia Breast Cancer Foundation working on patient and legislative advocacy issues. She was diagnosed with stage I breast cancer in 1995 at the age of 45 while living in California. After recovering from surgery, Branch joined Y-ME Breast Cancer Organization in San Diego, and then got involved with the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC). She took the NBCC’s Project LEAD and designed an outreach program for the African American community in San Diego County. Branch has served as a peer reviewer of grants for the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program, Susan G. Komen for the Cure and the Susan Love, M.D. Breast Cancer Foundation.

After relocating to the Richmond, Virginia, area, Branch began implementing a program for health professionals using African American outreach materials for newly diagnosed patients. She also works as the minority recruiter for the Sister Study of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Branch is a member of the Director’s Consumer Liaison Group, which advises the director of the National Cancer Institute about the consumer advocacy perspective.

Branch has received several awards, including the NBCC Outstanding Advocacy Award, Honorary Survivor Chair for the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, and the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Hero Award.

Shelley A. Hearne, DrPH
Shelley Hearne is the managing director of health and human services policy at the Pew Charitable Trusts. Dr. Hearne most recently was a visiting professor and director of policy and practice at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She was the founding executive director of Trust for America’s Health, a national organization dedicated to preventing epidemics, and protecting people. Her prior positions include executive director of the Pew Environmental Health Commission, the acting director of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s Office of Pollution Prevention, and a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. She was the past chair of the American Public Health Association’s Executive Board and vice president of the Council on Education for Public Health, the accreditation body for public health schools.

Dr. Hearne has authored many national health reports, testified regularly before the U.S. Congress, and served as a public health expert in the press and public, including graduation speeches at the University of South Carolina and UMDNJ/Rutgers Schools of Public Health. She is the national recipient of the Delta Omega Curriculum Award honoring innovative public health teaching and received the Senator Frank R. Lautenberg award for lifetime achievement in public health advocacy. Dr. Hearne holds a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and environmental studies with honors from Bowdoin College and a doctorate in environmental health sciences from Columbia University’s School of Public Health.

Jeanne L. Mockard, MBA
Jeanne Mockard is the current vice chair and a former chair of the Silent Spring Institute Board of Directors. She is a Private Investment Manager. Previously she was a Managing Director and Senior Portfolio Manager at Putnam Investments where she was the Lead Manager for The George Putnam Fund of Boston, a $4.2B balanced fund. She is a C.F.A. charterholder and has 23 years of investment experience. Mockard also serves on the endowment committee for The Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore, Maryland.

Ellen Parker
Ellen Parker is a former chair of the Silent Spring Institute Board of Directors. She is a social worker in private practice in Newton, Massachusetts, where she specializes in psychotherapy with individuals and couples. She is a former president and founding board member of the Massachusetts Breast Cancer Coalition. She is also a founding board member of Silent Spring Institute. Parker has served as director of social work services for the Tufts–New England Medical Center. In 2008 the Massachusetts Commission on the Status of Women named her an Unsung Heroine. She has also been recognized with the American Hospital Association’s Eleanor Clark Award for Innovative Programs in Patient Care and with the National Association of Social Workers’ Social Worker of the Year Award.

Mary S. Wolff, PhD
Mary Wolff is a professor in the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine as well as the Derald H. Ruttenberg Cancer Center and director of the Division of Environmental Health Science at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. Dr. Wolff is director of the Center for Children’s Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research, a multidisciplinary research program funded by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Her research interests focus upon measurement of environmental exposures—including diet, lifestyle, and individual susceptibility factors—and their relationship to cancer risk, reproductive dysfunction, and developmental disorders. Her research has also addressed ethnic variability in exposures and how these differences may be related to disease risk. As one of the NIEHS Breast Cancer and Environment Research Centers, her group is investigating environmental and genetic risks for early puberty to elucidate risk for breast cancer and other chronic diseases. She directs two research cohorts of children followed since before birth, to examine risks associated with prenatal exposures, including women who were exposed to chemicals and traumatic events at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

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