MOUNT VERNON -- Kathie Olsen, former chief scientist at NASA who was appointed by President Bush as associate director for science in the
Office of Science and Technology Policy, will lecture at Cornell College on Monday, May 10, at 11 a.m. in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons. Admission is free.
Her lecture, "From a Science Degree to the White House," is the first in Cornell's Donna Russell Fox Women in Science Lecture series. Fox attended Cornell in the 1940s and is a retired speech pathologist at the University of Houston.
Olsen was appointed to the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in 2002. Previously she had been chief scientist at NASA, serving as the administrator's senior scientific adviser and principal contact with the national and international scientific community. She was also acting associate administrator for the Enterprise in Biological and Physical Research.
OSTP advises the president on the impacts of science and technology on domestic and international affairs. The Office of Science and Technology, as OSTP was known from 1961-73, was directed in 1969-70 by Lee DuBridge, a 1922 Cornell graduate and internationally known physicist who also was White House science adviser to Presidents Truman and Eisenhower.
Olsen earned a bachelor of science degree, with honors, in biology and psychology from Chatham College and a doctorate in neuroscience from the University of California, Irvine. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the department of neuroscience at Children's Hospital of Harvard Medical School. At the State University of New York at Stony Brook she was a research scientist at Long Island Research Institute and an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral science at the medical school.
Prior to joining NASA in May 1999 she was the senior staff associate for the Science and Technology Centers in the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Integrative Activities. From February 1996 until November 1997 she was a Brookings Institute Legislative Fellow and then an NSF detail in the office of Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana. Preceding her work on Capitol Hill, she served for two years as acting director for the Division of Integrative Biology and Neuroscience at the NSF, where she has worked and held numerous other science-related positions.
The Donna Russell Fox Women in Science Lecture series will bring to campus high-achieving women in the science or social science communities to lecture and serve as role models for students intending careers in these fields. Fox holds a doctorate in speech pathology and psychology from the University of Missouri. She taught for 30 years at the University of Houston, where her primary research focused on cleft palate toddlers, along with other communication disorders.
The lecture series, initiated in 2004, honors Fox's parents, Raymond and Cecillia Russell.
