Leadership
The people leading the Coalition
Our Board Chair guides the scientific direction of the coalition on behalf of its member organizations; our Director runs day-to-day advocacy in Washington.
Board Chair
Jo Handelsman, Ph.D.
Jo Handelsman is a microbiologist and Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she is also a Vilas Research Professor and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor.
Appointed by President Barack Obama, she served three years as Associate Director for Science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, until January 2017.
Handelsman earned her B.S. in agronomy from Cornell University in 1979 and her Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1984. She joined the Wisconsin faculty in plant pathology in 1985 and later taught at Yale University in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology.
Her research examines microbial communities in soil and the insect gut. She coined the term "metagenomics" and pioneered the use of functional metagenomics to study antibiotic resistance.
A national leader on science education and the advancement of women in science, she co-directed the Women in Science and Engineering Leadership Institute and was the first president of the Rosalind Franklin Society. She received the Alice C. Evans Award in 2008 and the Presidential Award for Science Mentoring in 2011, was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2023.
She has been editor-in-chief of DNA and Cell Biology and is the author or co-author of six books, including Scientific Teaching, Entering Mentoring, and A World Without Soil.
Director
Adrienne Hallett
Adrienne Hallett is the Director of the Coalition for Life Sciences. She has 25 years of health and science policy experience at the highest levels of the US government.
Most recently, Ms. Hallett was the Vice President for Global Policy at Cambrian Biopharma, an innovative start-up working in preventive medicine and the biology of aging.
Hallett previously served as the Associate Director for Legislative Policy & Analysis for the National Institutes of Health, the world's largest funder of biomedical research. She briefly served as an advisor to the Biden White House on the establishment of ARPA-H and the launch of a national initiative to eliminate Hepatitis C.
Prior to her executive branch experience, she served on the Appropriations Committee of the US Senate as a lead negotiator for funding of public health and research programs. She drafted dozens of US health laws, including portions of the Affordable Care Act relating to prevention policies and programs.
Ms. Hallett teaches public policy at the Stanford University Center for Biodesign. She holds a Master's in Theological Studies from Vanderbilt Divinity School with a concentration in Ethics.