Senator Joseph I. Lieberman Award
The Center for Excellence in Education (CEE) bestows the Senator Joseph I. Lieberman Award every two years to a distinguished Research Science Institute (RSI) or USA Biolympiad (USABO) program alumnus. The award acknowledges significant STEM and business accomplishments and recognizes Senator Lieberman’s longtime support as a CEE Trustee for 17 years. The Lieberman Award includes a $10,000 stipend from CEE. Past recipients are:
2023
Dr. Aaron S. Kesselheim, MD, JD, MPH (RSI ’91) is Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and a faculty member in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Dr. Kesselheim developed and leads the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law, one of the largest non-industry funded academic research centers in the country that focuses on pharmaceutical policy and evidence-based use of medicines. Author of over 600 publications in peer-reviewed medical and health policy literatures, Dr. Kesselheim was recognized as one of the top 3 most cited health law scholars in the U.S. from 2013-2020 in Web of Science, Westlaw, and Google Scholar. Dr. Kesselheim has testified before Congress on pharmaceutical policy, medical device regulation, generic drugs, and modernizing clinical trials. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics. In 2020, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.
Dr. Kesselheim earned his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and his master’s degree from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He earned an AB degree from Harvard University.
2021
Mark Kantrowitz (RSI ’84) is President of Cerebly, Inc. and a CEE Trustee. He is a nationally recognized expert on student financial aid, scholarships, college savings plans, and student loans. His mission is to deliver practical information, advice and tools to students and their families for them to make informed decisions about planning and paying for college. Mr. Kantrowitz has been quoted in more than 10,000 newspaper and magazine articles about college admissions and financial aid. He writes extensively about student financial aid policy. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reuters, Huffington Post, U.S. News & World Report, Money Magazine, Bottom Line/Personal, Forbes, Newsweek and Time magazine. He was named a Money Hero by Money magazine. Mark is the author of bestselling books about scholarships and financial aid, including How to Appeal for More College Financial Aid, Twisdoms about Paying for College, Filing the FAFSA and Secrets to Winning a Scholarship. He has testified before Congress and federal/state agencies about student aid on several occasions. He received bachelor of science degrees in mathematics and philosophy from MIT and a master’s of science degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.
Lauren K. Williams, PhD (RSI ’94), is Dwight Parker Robinson Professor of Mathematics in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Sally Starling Seaver Professor at the Radcliffe Institute. She is known for her work on cluster algebras, tropical geometry, algebraic combinatorics, amplituhedra, and the positive Grassmannian. She earned an A.B. in mathematics from Harvard University and a PhD in 2005 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her dissertation was titled Combinatorial Aspects of Total Positivity. In 2012, she became one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society. She is second ever tenured female math professor at Harvard. She is the 2016 winner of the Association for Women in Mathematics and Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory.
2019
Ben Silbermann (RSI ’98) is Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer of
the image sharing site Pinterest, which went public in April 2019 and had 454 million users worldwide as of June 2021, ranking the 14th largest social network in the world. Pinterest lets users save, organize, and share image collections from recipes to hairstyles to crafts and home decor through their mobile phones or computers. He previously worked for Google as an ad designer. He has received The Crunchie Award, the Webby Award for Best Social Media App People’s Voice Award for Best Functioning Visual Design, Tenyck Award, and the Yale 50K Business Plan Competition. He received his BA in political science at Yale University.
2017
Lauren Ancel Meyers, PhD (RSI ’90), is the Cooley Centennial Professor of Integrative Biology and Statistics & Data Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin and a member of the Santa Fe Institute External Faculty. She was trained as a mathematical biologist at Harvard and Stanford Universities and has been a pioneer in the field of network epidemiology and the application of machine learning to improve outbreak detection, forecasting and control. Professor Meyers leads an interdisciplinary team of scientists, engineers, and public health experts in uncovering the social and biological drivers of epidemics and building practical tools for the CDC and other global health agencies to track and mitigate emerging viral threats, including COVID-19, pandemic influenza, Ebola, HIV, and Zika. Her research has been published in over 100 peer-reviewed articles in major journals and covered by the popular press, including The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, CNN, and the BBC. Professor Meyers was named as one of the top 100 global innovators under age 35 by the MIT Technology Review in 2004. She received a BA in mathematics & philosophy from Harvard University and received a PhD in mathematical biology from Stanford University.
2015
Feng Zhang, PhD (RSI ’99), is a pioneer of the revolutionary CRISPR gene-editing technology, a McGovern Investigator, the James and Patricia Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at MIT and a professor in MIT’s Departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biological Engineering, a Core Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is a founder of Sherlock Biosciences and the public companies Arbor Biotechnologies, Editas Medicine, and BEAM Therapeutics. He is also a trustee of the Society for Science & the Public, CEE, and the Museum of Science. Zhang is a recipient of many awards including the Canada Gairdner International Award, the Tang Prize, the Blavatnik National Award for Young Scientists, the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, the Lemelson-MIT Prize, and the Keio Medical Science Prize. He has also received technology innovation awards from the Paul G. Allen Family, McKnight, New York Stem Cell, and Damon Runyon foundations. Zhang is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received an AB in chemistry and physics from Harvard College and a PhD in chemistry from Stanford University.
2013
Terence Tao, PhD (RSI ’89), Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is widely regarded as one of the greatest living mathematicians. His primary focuses are harmonic analysis, PDE, geometric combinatorics, arithmetic combinatorics, analytic number theory, compressed sensing, and algebraic combinatorics. Dr. Tao has received national and international recognition for his significant contributions to mathematics, including the Riemann Prize in Mathematics, Salem Prize, the Bocher Memorial Prize, the Fields Medal and SASTRA Ramanujan Prize, and the MacArthur Fellowship, Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, and Ostrowski Prize. Terence Tao currently holds the first James and Carol Collins Chair in the UCLA College of Letters and Science and is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Australian Academy of Sciences. He is also a 2006 MacArthur Fellow. He has been the author or co-author of over three hundred research papers. He received a B.Sci, Mathematics from Flinders University and a PhD in mathematics from Princeton University.