On 1 November 2007, Shirley M. Tilghman, the president of Princeton University, will deliver the 2007 Ullyot Public Affairs Lecture at CHF, "Strategy or Happenstance: Science Policy in the U.S.A." This event is free and open to the public.

About Shirley M. Tilghman
Tilghman became Princeton University's 19th president in June of 2001. An exceptional teacher, a world-renowned scholar, and a leader in the field of molecular biology, she served on the Princeton faculty for 15 years before being named president.

Tilghman received her Honors B.Sc. in chemistry from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, in 1968 and her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Temple University in Philadelphia.

During postdoctoral studies at the National Institutes of Health she made a number of groundbreaking discoveries while participating in cloning the first mammalian gene and continued to make scientific breakthroughs as an independent investigator at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia and as an adjunct associate professor of human genetics and biochemistry and biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tilghman came to Princeton in 1986 as the Howard A. Prior Professor of the Life Sciences. Two years later she joined the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as an investigator. In 1998 she took on additional responsibilities as the founding director of Princeton's multi-disciplinary Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics.

A member of the National Research Council's committee that set the blueprint for the U.S. effort in the Human Genome Project, Tilghman was also one of the founding members of the National Advisory Council of the Human Genome Project Initiative for the National Institutes of Health.

She is renowned not only for her pioneering research, but for her national leadership on behalf of women in science and for promoting efforts to support the early careers of young scientists.

From 1993 through 2000 Tilghman chaired Princeton's Council on Science and Technology, which encourages the teaching of science and technology to students outside the sciences, and in 1996 she received Princeton's President's Award for Distinguished Teaching. In 2002 Tilghman was one of the five winners of the L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science and the following year received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Developmental Biology.

Tilghman is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the Royal Society of London. She serves as a Trustee of the Jackson Laboratory and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

About the Ullyot Public Affairs Lecture
The Ullyot Public Affairs Lecture was established in 1990 to emphasize to the general public the positive role that the chemical and molecular sciences play in our lives. Ullyot Lectures are held annually and are open to the public. Ullyot lecturers are distinguished in their fields, nationally recognized, and able to communicate to a nonscientific audience. Past Ullyot Lecturers

The Ullyot Public Affairs Lecture is jointly sponsored by the Chemical Heritage Foundation, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of the Sciences, and the Philadelphia Section and Delaware Section of the American Chemical Society.

Past Ullyot Lecturers

Ullyot Scholarship