2001 Assembly of Delegates:
Nominees for President

November 9-11, 2001, Raleigh, North Carolina
In conjunction with the Sigma Xi Forum, November 8-9, 2001

D. Allen Bromley
Sterling Professor of Sciences, Yale University

D. Allan Bromley is the first Sterling Professor of the Sciences and was Dean of Engineering from 1994-2000 at Yale University; during 1989-1993 he was The Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in the Executive Office of the President of the United States.

One of the world's leading nuclear physicists, he was founder and Director of the A. W. Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory at Yale from 1963-1989. From 1972 until 1993 he held the Henry Ford II Professorship in Physics at Yale and from 1970 to 1977 served as chairman of the Yale Physics Department.  He has published over 500 papers in science and technology as well as edited or authored twenty books and has received numerous honors and awards, including, in 1988, the National Medal of Science, the highest U.S. scientific award.

For more than two decades, Dr. Bromley has been a leader in the national and international science and science policy communities.  As president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's largest scientific society, of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, the world coordinating body for that science, and of the American Physical Society he has been one of the leading spokesmen for U.S. science and for international scientific cooperation.

The first person to hold the Cabinet level rank of The Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, Dr. Bromley revitalized and chaired the Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering and Technology and achieved an unprecedented level of cooperation and communication among the more than twenty federal agencies that support U.S. science and technology.  For the first time, he published a formal statement of U.S. Technology Policy and played a central role in greatly expanding cooperation between the federal government and the private sector toward more effective utilization of technology throughout U.S. society.

Prior to his appointment to the Bush Administration, Dr. Bromley served as a member of the White House Science Council throughout the Reagan Administration and as a member of the National Science Board in 1988-89. 

Born in Westmeath, Ontario, Canada, he received the B.Sc. degree with highest honors in 1948 in the Faculty of Engineering at Queen's University, Ontario, Canada.  He received the M.Sc. degree from Queen's University in 1950 and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Rochester in 1952, both degrees in nuclear physics.  He subsequently has been awarded thirty-two honorary doctorates from universities in Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, South Africa and the United States.

He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, of the Royal South African Academy of Sciences, Academician of the International Higher Education Academy of Sciences, Moscow, and a Benjamin Franklin Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London.

During his APS Presidency he played a leadership role in coordinating the activities of 110 American scientific and technological professional societies representing more than 3.5 million scientists, mathematicians and engineers in support of continuing federal investment in academic science and technology.

He serves on a number of Presidential commissions and on the Boards of Directors of several private sector corporations; he is a founding partner of the Washington Advisory Group LLC.

Candidate's Statement – D. Allen Bromley
Shortly after my arrival at Yale in 1960 I was elected to the chairmanship of the Yale chapter of Sigma Xi.  We held monthly meetings with speakers such as Edwin Land of Polaroid, Wilder Penfield, Neurosurgeon from McGill, the then administrator of NASA, and Robert Galvin of Motorola.  Our meetings were well attended and our President Kingman Brewster hosted a dinner for each with senior faculty and administrators, speaker and our Provost, Charles Taylor hosted a luncheon with students and junior faculty.  The Sigma Xi events were major occasions on the Yale calendar and students elected to membership considered such election to be a highhonor.  Unhappily, neither is any longer the case; both the University and the students have lost interest.  My first goal, were I to be elected President, would be to build the reputation of the Society in the local chapters and return election to membership as a high honor.

The Sigma Xi chapters are unique among all the US scientific organizations in giving access to the scientific grass roots and I would hope, as President, to mobilize local members and make a more compelling case for continued federal, state, and industrial investment in our national scientific and technological enterprise.

Lastly I consider American Scientist to be one of the best scientific publications in its field and will do everything in my power to support and expand its scope and quality.

Peter H. Raven
Director, Missouri Botanical Garden and Engelmann Professor of Botany, Washington University in St. Louis

Peter H. Raven is the director of the Missouri Botanical Garden and Engelmann Professor of Botany at Washington University in St. Louis, a position he has held for more than 30 years.  He previously served for nine years as a faculty member in the Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University.  A native of California, Dr. Raven received his A.B. degree from the University of California, Berkeley ( becoming a member of Sigma Xi there in 1956) and his Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles.  Currently president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he has also served as president of many other organizations, including the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the Botanical Society of America, and the Organization for Tropical Studies.  Last year, Dr. Raven was awarded the National Medal of Science for his contributions to the fields of biodiversity and the environment.

Raven was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1977, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977, and  the American Philosophical Society in 1988.  He served for 12 years as home secretary of the NAS and concurrently as Chair of the National Research Council's Report Review Committee.  Currently, he chairs the NRC's Division of Earth and Life Sciences, which oversees the Council's work in biology, agriculture, the environment, geology, and chemistry.  He also heads the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration.

During his three decades of service, Raven has led the Missouri Botanical Garden into a position of international prominence for research relating to plants. The Garden employs more than 50 Ph.D.-level scientists in St. Louis and abroad. Major studies are concentrated in Latin America and Africa, with other significant activities in Vietnam, China, the former Soviet Union, and North America.  These researchers strive to improve knowledge about plants of various countries in a global age of extinction.  The Garden also helps to build institutions and foster individual training and development as a means of assisting other countries in the understanding and use of their biological resources for their own benefit.

In the early 1960s, Peter Raven and Paul Ehrlich, a colleague at Stanford, developed the theory of coevolution.  Originally based on the relationship between butterflies and plants, this concept has been a highly fruitful one, inspiring many thousands of subsequent papers and becoming a Citation Classic. Other research by Dr. Raven has concentrated on the systematics and evolutionary diversification of the evening primrose plant family, Onagraceae, and on biogeography and evolution in general.  He co-founded of the Flora of China project in 1987, and has served as co-chair of its editorial committee from that time to the present.  This major botanical effort includes the production of a descriptive encyclopedia of the 30,000 kinds of plants found in China, and involves the collaboration of botanists from throughout the world.

International recognition of Raven's role as a leading environmentalist and global team builder is attested to by his election to membership in the national academies of Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Chile, China, Denmark, Hungary, India, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden, and Ukraine, as well as of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Third World Academy of Sciences, and the World Academy of Art and Science.  He has won many awards, including the International Prize in Biology from the government of Japan, the Volvo Environment Prize, Sasekawa Environment Prize from UNEP, and Tyler Prize; has held Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships; and has been awarded 21 honorary degrees by institutions in the U.S., Argentina, the Netherlands, and Russia.  In 1999 Raven was described by Time magazine as a "Hero for the Planet." 

Candidate's Statement – Peter Raven
As a long-time member of Sigma Xi (45 years), I have consistently been proud of The American Scientist, with its extraordinary contribution to the public understanding of a unified science that nurtures and supports society, and its unremitting devotion to excellent writing.  I have occasionally participated in local and national meetings and witnessed first-hand the enthusiasm that pervades the chapters, and their importance in supporting excellence in science.

At the same time, the outreach programs of the Society have been influential in molding public attitudes toward science, and could beneficially become even more so in the future.   Very useful has been the Society's capacity to provide widespread downlink opportunities for a series of important events to a wide range of audiences, in addition to the traditional series of lectures and other activities of that sort.  Holding forums on key topics, encouraging young researchers, and enhancing science education are all important aspects of the Society's current activities, and all should be strengthened to the extent possible.

As president, I would attempt to help strengthen what I believe to  be a healthy trend to empower and encourage local chapters, which play such a key role in so many diverse settings in promoting science at many levels.  Increasing the relevance of Sigma Xi activities at these chapters obviously must be a high priority for the coming years, and I highly esteem its potential for promoting the understanding of an integrated role science among faculty and students alike.  Building on this base, science can be better understood generally as an integrated pursuit that pervades every aspect of modern life.  In pursuing these objectives, I would attempt to build on the excellent leadership provided by the officers of the Society in recent years.  It would be highly advantageous to increase the funds available for graduate student research, and I would attempt to pursue that objective if elected.

In addition, we must seek ways to demonstrate the international nature of science, and the dependency of industrialized countries not only on one another but on nations all over the world: science is an ideal way to demonstrate such interdependency.  As the world strives to achieve a sustainable use of its resources, science has a key role to play.  In the current century, we must find new ways of doing things that will be sustainable and support future generations for the indefinite future.