Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Speaker Biographies

Carol Adelman is a senior fellow specializing in international health care, foreign trade, and economic development at the Hudson Institute. During her twenty-five years of professional experience as a public servant and consultant to private businesses and nonprofit organizations, she specialized in international public policy and overseas business marketing and development. Ms. Adelman has served as director, consultant, and member in numerous nonprofit organizations, including the Center for International Private Enterprise of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Atlantic Council, Council on Foreign Relations, American Red Cross, and Capital Partners for Education. Her experience with the federal government includes working with the Office of Economic Opportunity and the Agency for International Development, where she served as a presidential appointee heading U.S. foreign aid programs to Asia, the Middle East, and Central and Eastern Europe. Ms. Adelman also has served as an adviser to multinational food and pharmaceutical companies. She conducted research on the international regulation of food and pharmaceuticals and Third World health and economic issues.

Amir Attaran is a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs where his research focuses on international development and public health; international trade, intellectual property, and licensing law; overseas development aid for global health; and access to pharmaceuticals in developing countries. He is also a lecturer at the school of epidemiology and public health at Yale University. Mr. Attaran was a research fellow and adjunct lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Previously he was a staff lawyer at the Sierra Legal Defense Fund and a consultant to Doctors without Borders. He is currently working on an assessment of international efforts to provide antiretroviral treatment for AIDS and a book titled Delivering Essential Medicines: The Way Forward.

Roger Bate is a visiting fellow at AEI. Before coming to AEI, Mr. Bate was director of the International Policy Network from 2001 to 2003, director of the Environmental Unit at the Institute of Economic Affairs from 1993 to 2003, and director of the European Science and Environment Forum from 1995 to 2001. Mr. Bate researches water policy in developing countries, health policy and endemic diseases in developing countries (AIDS and malaria), international environmental and health agreements (industrial chemicals, climate change, and water), the role of aid agencies and NGOs in developing countries, and genetically modified organisms and pesticide policy in developing countries. He has written numerous articles and opinion pieces, as well as several books, including Saving Our Streams: The Role of the Anglers Conservation Association in Preventing Pollution in English and Welsh Rivers (Institute of Economic Affairs, 2001); Malaria and the DDT Story (Institute of Economic Affairs, 2001); and Life’s Adventure: Virtual Risk in a Real World (Butterworth Heinemann, 2000).

Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at AEI. For many years he served as a member of Harvard University’s Center for Population and Development Studies, and he is currently a member of the Visiting Committee for the Harvard School of Public Health. He is a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics and the Advisory Committee for Voluntary Foreign Aid for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). He has served as a consultant for the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. State Department, USAID, World Bank, and other institutions on such topics as demography, international development, and East Asian security. Mr. Eberstadt has published over three hundred studies and articles in scholarly and popular journals, including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the New York Review of Books, Commentary, The New Republic, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.  His books include The Population of North Korea (coauthor with Judith Banister, 1992); The End of North Korea (1999); Korea’s Future and the Great Powers (coeditor with Richard J. Ellings, 2001); Fault Lines in China’s Economic Terrain (coauthor with Charles Wolf Jr., K.C. Yeh, Benjamin Zycher, and Sung-Ho Lee, 2003); and most recently, Health and the Income Inequality Hypothesis (2004). Mr. Eberstadt is a founding member of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and a member of the Board of Advisers of the Korean Economic Institute of America.

James K. Glassman is a resident fellow at AEI and the host of TechCentralStation.com. He also writes a syndicated financial column, which appears on the front page of the Washington Post business section every Sunday and is published in other newspapers, including the New York Daily News and the International Herald Tribune. Mr. Glassman is the author of The Secret Code of the Superior Investor (Crown), which Business Week called the best financial book of the 2002 season and Barron’s selected as one of the year’s ten best. His first book, Dow 36,000 (Times Books), a bestseller coauthored with the economist and AEI scholar Kevin A. Hassett, was praised by Newsweek’s Allan Sloan for its “wonderfully clear explanations of financial theory [and] excellent advice on general investing approaches.” Mr. Glassman has given frequent congressional testimony, recently on subjects as varied as telecommunications policy, Securities and Exchange Commission regulations, Social Security reform, and personal investing. He is a popular speaker on economic, political, and investing topics.

Scott Gottlieb, M.D., is a physician and director of medical policy development at the Food and Drug Administration. He was senior adviser for medical technology to former FDA commissioner Mark McClellan and was a resident fellow at AEI specializing in medicines, biotechnology, and pharmaceuticals. Dr. Gottlieb was the author of The Gilder Biotechnology Report, the senior editor for “Pulse” in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and served on the editorial staff of the British Medical Journal. Previously, he worked as a healthcare analyst at Alex.Brown & Sons.

Abner Mason is the founder and executive director of AIDS Responsibility Project. He is also a member (and chairman of the international committee) of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. PACHA provides advice, information and recommendations to the president and the secretary of health and human services regarding programs and policies to promote effective prevention, treatment, research, and care of HIV/AIDS in the U.S. and around the world. As chairman of the international committee, Mr. Mason’s focus has been on the development of policy recommendations to insure effective U.S. leadership in the fight against AIDS in highly impacted poor countries. President George W. Bush appointed him to PACHA in 2002. Mr. Mason previously spent ten years in Massachusetts state government most recently serving as chief policy adviser to Massachusetts governors Paul Cellucci and Jane Swift. He also served as Governor Cellucci’s under secretary of transportation and as deputy general manager of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, the nations seventh largest public transit system.

Richard Tren is a founder and director of the South African health advocacy group Africa Fighting Malaria. He has conducted a considerable amount of research on the political economy of malaria control and has published widely on the topic. Mr. Tren has also written about health and development policy, with his work appearing in Business Day (South Africa), the Wall Street Journal Europe, and Business Standard (India), among other publications. With coauthor Roger Bate, he wrote When Politics Kills: Malaria and the DDT Story, published in South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, and India. Mr. Tren has produced a study of malaria control in India in conjunction with the New Delhi-based Liberty Institute, and most recently he authored a review of malaria control in South Africa in conjunction with the Cato Institute.