Plenary Speakers
The Labs21 2008 Annual Conference featured several special speakers in the opening and closing plenary sessions. Learn more about the speakers who shared their vision in the opening and closing plenary sessions.
Opening Plenary Session Speakers
Phil Wirdzek, President and Executive Director, I2SL
William Lawrence, U.S. Department of State
President Rachid Benmokhtar Benabdellah, President of the Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco
Richard Kidd IV, Program Manager, Federal Energy Management Program, U.S. Department of Energy
Luis A. Luna, Assistant Administrator
Office of Administration and Resources Management, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Keynote Address: Dr. Marcia McNutt, President and CEO of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
Phil Wirdzek, President and Executive Director, I2SL
A career employee of 27 years with EPA, Mr.Wirdzek began laying the foundation of the Labs21 program in the early 1990s, working as the national energy and pollution prevention coordinator for EPA's laboratories. In 2004, Mr. Wirdzek formed I2SL, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation with a mission to promote the education and exchange of design, engineering, and operational practices for high-performance facilities.
William Lawrence, U.S. Department of State
Mr. Lawrence is the State Department Advisor for Islamic World Science Partnerships in the Bureau of Oceans, Environment, and Science, where he focuses on science engagement both with North African countries and with the wider Muslim World.
He has served the State Department in a variety of roles, traveling frequently to implement newly signed science cooperation agreements with Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Libya, having helped to negotiate the latter of these agreements. He served as the 2008 co-chair of the $4 million U.S.-Egypt Science and Technology Fund, serves on the steering committee of the Maghreb Digital Library and created its pilot project, and just returned from temporary duty in Tripoli as Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Officer.
Mr. Lawrence was a primary organizer of the January 2007 conference for Women Leaders in Science, Technology, and Engineering, which brought together 270 women scientists from 18 Arab countries and Turkey, organizing a 31-member U.S. delegation which included senior scientists, CEOs, university presidents, and an active astronaut.
President Rachid Benmokhtar Benabdellah, President of the Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco
Rachid Benmokhtar Benabdellah is president of Al Akhawayn University, Morocco, a position to which he was appointed by Late King Hassan II in June 1998. Benmokhtar started his career with IBM France in 1967. In 1973 he co-founded the first Moroccan consulting company for computer science and management. In 1978, he founded a Moroccan subsidiary of Parsons Brinckerhoff. He served as Moroccan Minister of Education from February 1995 to March 1998. Benmokhtar is a member of the Hassan II Academy of Science and Techniques, Chairman of the Scientific Committee in charge of the human development of the 50th anniversary of Moroccan independence. He is a member of the committee of experts on Public Administration of the United Nations and President of the Moroccan Foundation for Nature and Mankind.
Richard Kidd IV, Program Manager, Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP), U.S. Department of Energy
Richard Kidd joined FEMP in July 2008, bringing with him a diverse set of management, leadership, and diplomatic skills gained through work experience in over 70 countries and service in a variety of public and international organizations. After receiving a Masters Degree in Public and Private Management from Yale University, Richard joined the United Nations in 1993 and served in a variety of international assignments. He twice served as the UN World Food Programme's senior most representative within a country, and played a key leadership role in the supply chain re-engineering efforts at two UN organizations. Returning to the United States in 1999, Richard led a unique consortium of non-governmental organizations in a pioneering effort to conduct comprehensive socio-economic surveys of the impact of dangerous munitions and weapons in post-conflict countries. Following the events of 9/11, he was recruited by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Political Military Affairs. In 2003 he assumed the duties of Office Director in the Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement. As office director he twice served as Head of Delegation to two major UN multilateral negotiations and managed a program budget in excess of $126 million with activities in more than 30 countries. In June 2007, he was selected to serve as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Political Military Affairs (acting) where he oversaw the functions of four separate offices the activities of which included treaty negotiations, operational coordination with the Department of Defense, and post-conflict response. Additionally he was Bureau’s senior executive responsible for business administration and budget activities. During this entire period Richard remained current on developments in the field of alternative energy, renewable energy and energy security, collaborating, where appropriate, with organizations active in these areas.
Luis A. Luna, Assistant Administrator
Office of Administration and Resources Management, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 
Luis A. Luna is the Assistant Administrator responsible for Administration and Resources Management at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He serves as the Agency’s chief human capital officer, chief acquisition officer, chief environmental officer, and chief energy and transportation management officer. He is responsible for overseeing 17,000 employees, 10 million square feet of office and laboratory space, $4 billion a year in grants, and $1.2 billion in annual purchases of goods and services. Luis was nominated by President George W. Bush and unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
Prior to joining EPA, Luis was head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Office of Community Development in its Rural Development program. He also served for 10 years as executive director of the Greater Salisbury Committee, a nonprofit organization that acts as a catalyst for community improvement on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Luis worked for 11 years on Capitol Hill as a legislative assistant and counsel for members of both the Senate and House of Representatives. During the Reagan Administration, he served as a policy advisor at the Consumer Product Safety Commission and as an attorney-advisor in the Department of Justice. Luis has a bachelor's degree from the University of Maryland, College Park and a law degree from Georgetown University.
Dr. Marcia McNutt, Opening Plenary Keynote Speaker
Dr. Marcia McNutt is one of the nation’s leading experts on global climate change and its effect on the planet’s oceans. She currently serves as the president and CEO of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), one of the premier marine research laboratories in the nation. As a scientist, McNutt knows first-hand the devastating impacts global climate change can wreck on the Earth’s marine ecosystems. But she also acknowledges the dramatic, and positive, changes that can result from increased sustainability and improved environmental practices.
McNutt’s research ranges from studies of ocean island volcanism in French Polynesia to continental break-up in the Western United States to uplift of the Tibet Plateau. She has participated in 15 major oceanographic expeditions, and served as chief scientist on more than half of those voyages. She has published 90 peer-reviewed scientific articles.
After a brief appointment at the University of Minnesota, she spent three years at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, working on earthquake prediction. In 1982, she joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At MIT, she was appointed the Griswold Professor of Geophysics and served as director of the Joint Program in Oceanography and Applied Ocean Science and Engineering, a cooperative graduate educational program between MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
McNutt served as president of the American Geophysical Union from 2000-2002. She also chaired the President’s Panel on Ocean Exploration, convened by President Clinton to examine the possibility of initiating a major U.S. program in exploring the oceans. She was chair of the Board of Governors for Joint Oceanographic Institutions and is a Trustee of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership. She is the chair of University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS). She also serves on numerous evaluation and advisory boards for institutions such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Stanford University, Harvard University, Science Magazine, and Schlumberger.
Marcia McNutt is a native of Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she graduated class valedictorian from Northrop Collegiate School in 1970. In 1973, she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Colorado College in Colorado Springs. As a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, she studied geophysics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, where she earned a Ph.D. in Earth Sciences in 1978. She also holds honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Minnesota and from Colorado College.
I2SL would like to thank this year's Opening Plenary Session Keynote Sponsor:
| Silicon Valley Power |  |
Closing Plenary
Joe Phillips, Phillips Collaborative, LLC
Keynote Address: Dr. Chris Field, Director of the Department of Global Ecology, Stanford University
Julie Higginbotham, Laboratory Design Newsletter
Joe Phillips, Phillips Collaborative, LLC
Joe Phillips is president of Phillips Collaborative, LLC. He serves the science and technology community through the design and management of mission-critical facilities, integrating infrastructure with operations. Joe has worked in management and project delivery for leading architectural
and engineering design firms on projects worldwide for 20 years and has been a scientist and operations manager for the prior 15. He started Phillips Collaborative, a specializedprofessional services firm, in 2004 to more directly and accurately represent the unique demands of research and operations in complex capital facility planning and management.
Dr. Chris Field, Labs21 Luncheon and Go Beyond Awards Ceremony Keynote Speaker
Dr. Chris Field is the founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford University, and faculty director of Stanford's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. For most of the last two decades, Field has pushed the emergence of global ecology. His research emphasizes ecological contributions across the range of earth-science disciplines. Field and his colleagues have developed diverse approaches to quantifying large-scale ecosystem processes, using satellites, atmospheric data, models, and census data. They have explored local- and global-scale patterns of climate change impacts, vegetation-climate feedbacks, carbon cycle dynamics, primary production, forest management, and fire. At the ecosystem-scale, Field has, for more than a decade, led major experiments on grassland responses to global change, experiments that integrate approaches from molecular biology to remote sensing.
Field's activities in building the culture of global ecology include service on many national and international committees, including committees of the National Research Council, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, and the Earth System Science Partnership. Field was a coordinating lead author for the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He is a fellow of the ESA Aldo Leopold Leadership Program and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He has served on the editorial boards of Ecology, Ecological Applications, Ecosystems, Global Change Biology, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Field received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1981 and has been at the Carnegie Institution since 1984. His recent priorities include high-performance "green" laboratories, integrity in the use of science by governments, local efforts to reduce carbon emissions, ecological impacts of biofuels, and the future of scientific publishing.
Julie Higginbotham, Laboratory Design Newsletter
Julie S. Higginbotham has been editor of Laboratory Design newsletter, an Advantage Business Media (ABM) publication, since 1997. She is a graduate of Southern Illinois University and has been a business journalist for more than two decades, with a concentration on architecture/engineering/construction topics. Before joining ABM, Julie was managing editor of School and College Planning and Management magazine. She is the recipient of multiple awards for journalism, including the prestigious Jesse H. Neal Award, known as the "Pulitzer Prize of the business media."