Sierra Leone Peace Corps Medical Officer Mae Jemison elected to Gen-Probe Board of Directors
Dr. Mae C. Jemison Elected to Gen-Probe Board of Directors
SAN DIEGO - PRNewswire-FirstCall - March 16
SAN DIEGO, March 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Gen-Probe Incorporated announced today that Mae C. Jemison, M.D., founder of BioSentient Corporation and The Earth We Share(TM), has been elected to its board of directors. She replaces Kiyoshi Kurokawa, M.D., who resigned from the board due to increasing demands on his time in Japan. Gen-Probe's board now has eight members, including seven who are not Gen-Probe employees.
"We are pleased that Mae Jemison is bringing her remarkable expertise as a scientist, entrepreneur, educator and humanitarian to an already outstanding, independent Gen-Probe board," said Hank Nordhoff, Gen-Probe's chairman, president and chief executive officer. "At the same time, we thank Kiyoshi Kurokawa for his service and leadership since our spin-off from Chugai in 2002."
Dr. Jemison is founder of BioSentient Corporation, a medical technology devices and services company focused on improving health and human performance through physiologic awareness and self-regulation. She is guiding the company in the design, development and marketing of leading-edge, NASA-patented ambulatory equipment that provides real-time, real-life physiologic monitoring and the means to control one's responses to their environment and stimuli.
Dr. Jemison, the first woman of color to go into space, served six years as a NASA astronaut. She founded a technology consulting firm, The Jemison Group, and was an environmental studies professor at Dartmouth College, where she ran The Jemison Institute for Advancing Technologies in Developing Countries. A strong, committed national voice for science literacy, Dr. Jemison founded the international science camp The Earth We Share for students 12-16 years old, and serves as Bayer Corporation's national advocate for the Making Science Make Sense initiative.
Before joining NASA, Dr. Jemison served as the Area Peace Corps Medical Officer for Sierra Leone and Liberia in West Africa, and practiced medicine in Los Angeles. She is a board member of Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Scholastic, Inc. and Valspar Corporation, and an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. Dr. Jemison is a member of the Institute of Medicine, an inductee of the National Women's Hall of Fame and the National Medical Association Hall of Fame, and a winner of the Kilby Science Award. She majored in chemical engineering and African and Afro-American Studies as an undergraduate at Stanford, and received her medical degree from Cornell.
