Keynote Address:

The Honorable Subra Suresh, Ph. D., distinguished engineer and scientist, was nominated by President Barack Obama and unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in September 2010. As director of this $7-billion independent federal agency since October 2010, he leads the only government science agency charged with advancing all fields of fundamental science and engineering research and related education. NSF's programs and initiatives keep the United States at the forefront of science and engineering, empower future generations of scientists and engineers, and foster economic growth and innovation. Prior to assuming his current role, Suresh served as the dean of the School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His experimental and modeling work on the mechanical properties of structural and functional materials, innovations in materials design and characterization, and discoveries of possible connections between cellular nanomechanical processes and human disease states have shaped new fields in the fertile intersections of traditional disciplines. He has co-authored more than 240 journal articles, registered 21 patents, and written three widely used materials science books. More than a hundred students, postdoctoral fellows and visiting scholars have been members of his research group, and many of them now occupy prominent positions in academia, industry, and government worldwide. Suresh received his Bachelor of Technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in First Class with Distinction; a master's degree from Iowa State University; and a Doctor of Science degree from MIT. Following postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he joined the faculty of engineering at Brown University in December 1983, and was promoted to full professor in July 1989. He joined MIT in 1993 as the R.P. Simmons Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and served as head of MIT's Department of Materials Science and Engineering during 2000-2006.

Speaker - Forrestal Lecture:

Mr. Charles O. Holliday, Jr. is the Chairman of the Board, Bank of America Corporation, and the former Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of DuPont, 1998-2008. Under his direction, DuPont established its mission to achieve sustainable growth: increasing shareholder and societal value while decreasing the company’s environmental footprint. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and serves on the Board of Directors of Deere & Co, Royal Dutch Shell, CH2MHill, the Climate Works Foundation, the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University, and the National Geographic Education Foundation. Mr. Holliday is the Chairman of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Co-chair of the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Group on Sustainable Energy for All, past Chair of the Board of The Business Council, Catalyst, and the Council on Competitiveness.