Ernest R. Bibby, Jr. has been involved in education in North Carolina for 36 years and is presently Assistant Superintendent for School Improvement Planning and Technology, Granville County Schools in Oxford, N. C.  For the past 25 years he has lead efforts to improve science instruction in the K-12 public schools.  He has been an active member of a wide variety of committees, study groups, and task forces aimed at enhancing and improving science instructional delivery services in the classroom.  He served as a presenter at state, regional, and national science conferences.

During his tenure, he has been responsible for bringing over $3.2 million in federal, state, and private foundation grants to his school system.  Bibby has served as a science textbook consultant to a major national textbook company.  He holds memberships in major national and state science and educational leadership organizations.

He has been the recipient of several distinguished awards including Outstanding Administrator of the Year - National Science Education Leadership Association.  Science Supervisor of the Year - North Carolina Science Leadership Association, State Support Administrator of the Year – North Carolina Association of Educators.  In addition, Bibby has served as Board of Directors Member – National Science Education Leadership Association, President and Board of Directors Member – North Carolina Science Leadership Association, and Board of Directors Member – North Carolina Science Teachers Association.

Bibby has served as Director of the North Carolina State Science Fair and has provided leadership in the piloting and implementation of several education initiatives.  He is a graduate of the Education Policy Fellowship Program – Institute for Educational Leadership, and a graduate of the Technical Assistance Academy for Mathematics and Science Services – Southeast Eisenhower Regional Consortium @ SERVE.

Bibby has collaborated with many institutions and organizations on various educational initiatives and grants.  Collaborators include the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, UNC-CH Center for Mathematics and Science Education, North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, Office of the Governor- State of North Carolina, Public School Forum of North Carolina, Southeast Regional Vision for Education (SERVE), Eisenhower Consortium @SERVE, North Carolina Central University, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

He received his BS in Chemistry and MA in Education Administration and Supervision from NC Central University.  He has also attended UNC-CH, NC State and East Carolina U. 

Prof. Ken Carter is newly appointed Associate Professor of Chemistry at University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Until recently he served as Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. Over the last 12 years, he has performed research related to the design and use of high performance polymers in microelectronics applications. He has over 70 papers and 20 patents on his research. His projects have  included non-linear optical polymers, high-Tg packaging materials, high performance printer toner resins, low dielectric constant nanoporous polymers and more recently electroactive (OLED and bistable) polymers and the study of high resolution nanopatterning techniques. In addition to his position at IBM, Dr. Carter is also a principal investigator within the NSF Center on Polymeric Interfaces and Macromolecular Assemblies (CPIMA), an IBM/Stanford/UC Davis/UC Berkeley partnership. He has also served as Chair of the American Chemical
Society Division of Polymer Chemistry (2001-2004). Dr. Carter graduated (B.S. Chemistry) from the State University of New
York-Oneonta and received his Ph.D. (Inorganic/Polymer Chemistry) from the University of Vermont, having worked for Prof. Christopher W. Allen on the synthesis and characterization of phosphazene ring-containing polymers. Dr. Carter did a year of postdoctoral research at the IBM Almaden Research Center before joining the IBM Research Staff in 1992.

Dr. Diane J. Hymes is currently a Director of Technology reporting into the Vice President of New Product Development at Lam Research.  In this position she evaluates the potential of "new" technology (new to Lam) to translate into "commercially-interesting" technology.  This is enabled though management of both internal and external development programs. 

Previously, she was Director of Cleaning Process Technology at OnTrak Systems and was a member of the technical team there for more than four years. Before joining OnTrak she worked as an applications research scientist at MEMC Electronic Materials (St. Peters, MO), a silicon wafer manufacturer. She received her MS in 1984 and her PhD in 1987 in materials science and engineering from Brown University (Providence, RI).

She also served on the Industrial Advisory Board of NSF/SRC Engineering Research Center for Environmentally Benign Semiconductor Manufacturing headquartered at the University of Arizona.

Parry Norling is a visiting fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia where he writing a chapter for a book entitled “Innovation, Learning, and Institutional Change: Patterns of Knowledge Changes.”   From 2001-2003 he was AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Technology Fellow at the Science and Technology Policy Institute at RAND in Washington DC; he retired December 1998, after 33 years from the DuPont Company where he held a number of R&D and production management positions  plus two years as Corporate Director of Health and Safety.

            Following his retirement, in a part-time capacity, he was Corporate Technology Adviser at DuPont acting as an adviser to the Chief Technology Officer. A graduate of Harvard College and Princeton University with a BA in physical sciences and PhD in polymer chemistry, he is past-chairman of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry’s (IUPAC) CHEMRAWN (CHEMical Research Applied to World Needs) committee, past-Chairman of  the Industrial Research Institute (IRI) , member the Conservation Technical Advisory Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, member of the Board of Limen House (a United Way agency), member of the Academy of Life Long Learning at the University of Delaware, and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (class of 2000). He is currently a visiting adjunct professor in the physics department at Georgetown University where he teaches a course “Industrial Problems in Physics”.

            His interests include squash, tennis, paddle tennis, canoeing, skiing, hiking and reading.

Prof. Bala Subramaniam is currently the Dan F. Servey Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering and founding Director of the NSF Engineering Research Center for Environmentally Beneficial Catalysis at the University of Kansas.  He obtained a Bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Madras, India and a Ph. D. degree in chemical engineering from the University of Notre Dame.  He joined the faculty at the University of Kansas in 1985, and recently served as chair of his department. He has held visiting Professorships at the Institute of Process Engineering, ETH in Zurich, Switzerland and at the University of California, Davis.

Dr. Subramaniam's research interests are in near-critical processing and catalytic reaction engineering.  In recent years, his research has focused on exploiting supercritical fluids in catalytic reactions and in pharmaceutical processing. He has authored over 70 research publications including 10 patents, presented invited seminars at over 50 universities and companies, and delivered keynote/plenary lectures at a number of international conferences. He is on the editorial board of Applied Catalysis B: Environmental and has served on NSF/EPA program panels on environmentally benign processing.  He has also served on the scientific committees of several international conferences and is co-chair the Eighteenth International Symposium on Chemical Reaction Engineering held in Chicago in June 2004.  Dr. Subramaniam has received several awards for his teaching and research, including the Dow Outstanding Young Faculty Award from the American Society for Engineering Education, the Higuchi Award for Research Achievement and the Silver Anniversary Teaching Award from the University of Kansas, as well as the Miller Award for research and the Gould Award for teaching from the School of Engineering.