2006 National ESP Conference Speakers
C. D. (Dan) Mote, Jr., President of the University of Maryland is the invited speaker for the opening General Session. Dr. Mote, Jr. was appointed president of the University of Maryland in 1998 and charged to build a great university. He has spurred the University to lead the state in pursuit of key sectors, such as business, biosciences, engineering, science, security, and agriculture. During his tenure the number of student applications for admission and the reputation of the university have reached record heights. The USDA selected the campus to lead the project known as Prevention and Control of Avian Influenza in the U.S., and an alumnus has funded a new Center for Food Systems Security.
Dr. Mote was recruited from the University of California, Berkeley, where he earlier served as chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and as vice chancellor. He has written more than 300 publications, and holds patents in the U.S., Norway, Finland and Sweden. For many years the agricultural extension program in California supported his research. He earned his degrees in mechanical engineering at Berkeley.
Dr. Mote is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the National Academy of Engineering where he serves currently on the council.
In February 2006, Dr. Albert C. Pierce became the first Professor of Ethics and National Security at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. From August 1998, he had served as the founding director of the Center for the Study of Professional Military Ethics at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Before he assumed his duties at the Naval Academy, he had been Professor of Military Strategy at the National War College in Washington, D.C., where he taught courses in military strategy, the use of military force, civil-military relations, ethics, French security policy, and national security policymaking.
Dr. Pierce has been a defense correspondent for NBC News, Deputy Director of the Strategic Concepts Development Center (SCDC), an in-house think tank established by Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger, and he served as Assistant to the Secretary of Defense, writing speeches, Congressional testimony, and the Fiscal Year 1982 Annual Report for Secretary Harold Brown.
Dr. Pierce is a member of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, the International Studies Association, and the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society. In 1991 he was selected for a Pew Faculty Fellowship in International Affairs, and in 1994 he was chosen to participate in a Carnegie Council faculty summer institute on Teaching Ethics and International Affairs, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Also in 1994 he became one of the first two Americans to become an auditeur of the French Institut des Hautes Études de Défense Nationale.
Dr. Pierce is a graduate of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. with a major in politics, and he holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in political science from Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.
Among his recent publications are Ethics and the Future of Conflict, co-edited with Anthony F. Lang, Jr. and Joel H. Rosenthal (Prentice Hall Studies in International Relations, 2004); Strategy, Ethics, and the "War on Terrorism" (Berkeley Public Policy Press, 2003); A Model for Moral Leadership: Contemporary Applications, Occasional Paper No. 15 (The Cary M. Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility, Southern Methodist University, 2003); and "Conflict, Strategy, and Ethics," in J.I. Coffey and Charles T. Mathewes, editors.
The third General Session speaker, Dr. Carolyn B Brooks, Dean of the School of Agricultural and Natural Sciences and the 1890 Research Director at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore (UMES), will address the topic of the Land Grant Commitment to Higher Education for All.
Since the mid 1990s Brooks has served on a number of boards and committees of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges (NASULGC); held several offices and chaired numerous committees for the administrator associations of the 1890 land grant institutions; served on numerous review panels for USDA, NSF, and USAID, the National Research Council and the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. Presently and previously serves(ed) as a member of Minority Education Committees of the Board of Education and Training, the American Society for Microbiology.
She is featured as one of the 100 Distinguished African American Scientists in Distinguished African American Scientists of the 20th Century; and recipient of numerous awards including the Maryland Outstanding Educator Award from the Maryland Association for Higher Education, and a Recipient of the First Annual White House Initiative for Historically Black Colleges and Universities - Faculty Award for "Excellence in Science and Technology," and the "Woman of the Year Award", Maryland Eastern Shore Branch of the National Association of University Women.
Either through research programs or as a consultant or participant on federal review teams, Brooks has been involved in activities in Costa Rica, Honduras, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Tanzania, Malawi, Egypt, South Africa, Cameroon, Togo, Nigeria and Senegal.