48th Annual Meeting & Dinner

Welcome to the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering’s website for the 48th Annual Meeting and Dinner held May 24, 2023, at the Woodwinds in Branford. I am pleased we were able to join together – members and guests – to celebrate excellence in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine in our state. We gratefully thank our sponsors and attendees for their generous support, which made this celebration possible.

This website provides those unable to attend and others revisiting the celebration with information about our new members, honorary members, the 2023 Connecticut Medal of Science awardee, the Middle and High School student STEM awardees, the Academy’s Fellowship Program, and the keynote presenter. We encourage you to explore and share the site with your colleagues, friends, and family.

Why Science Matters: From the Pandemic and Beyond

Albert Ko

Dr. Albert Icksang Ko is the Raj and Indra Nooyi Professor of Public Health at the Yale School of Public Health and a Collaborating Researcher at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Brazilian Ministry of Health. His research centers on the health problems that have emerged as a consequence of rapid urbanization and social inequity. Dr. Ko coordinates a research program in Brazil, which focuses on delineating the role of social marginalization, urban ecology, and climate in the emergence of infectious disease threats in slum communities and informal settlements. He and his team have mobilized research capacity to develop and implement community-based interventions to epidemics of meningitis, leptospirosis, dengue, Zika virus infection and associated birth defects, and the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr. Ko is also Program Director of the Fogarty/NIH Global Health Equity Scholars Program which provides research training opportunities for US and LMIC post and pre-doctoral fellows at collaborating international sites. He is a member of the WHO R&D Taskforce for Zika Virus and R&D Blueprint Working Group. During the pandemic, he served with Indra Nooyi as co-chair of Governor Lamont’s Reopen Connecticut Advisory Group. Dr. Ko continues to advise the Governor and the State on its pandemic prevention and control plan, in addition to supporting the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in its COVID-19 response in Brazil.

The Academy created the category of Honorary Membership in 2009 to recognize individuals not otherwise eligible for membership. Honorary nominees are considered on the basis of outstanding service to the Academy through participation and/or activities in support of the Academy’s vision and mission.

Honorary members are nominated and designated after a 2/3rds vote of the Academy’s Council. Selection of Honorary Members is limited to no more than two individuals per year. Honorary Members shall be entitled to all privileges of membership, except voting and holding elective office.

Akiko Iwasaki

Dr. Iwasaki is recognized for her major discoveries in the areas of innate sensing of viruses, and instruction of adaptive anti-viral immunity. She has laid the foundation for key concepts in viral immunity and introduced innovative approaches in vaccine design to combat COVID-19. Dr. Iwasaki currently leads investigations into the pathophysiology of long COVID, including Co-Lead Investigator for the Yale LISTEN Study. The medal-bestowing ceremony will be scheduled at a time to be determined and the honor will be shared with members and guests at CASE’s 48th Annual Meeting and Dinner, to be held May 24, 2023, at the Woodwinds in Branford.

Dr. Iwasaki’s discoveries have resulted in paradigm shifts in our understanding of the immune response to infection and vaccine design. She is an expert on immune responses to viruses that occur at mucosal sites of host entry and has made key contributions to our understanding of how the host detects viruses, innate host defense mechanisms, generation of specific acquired immune responses, and design of new and improved vaccine strategies. Her two-stage vaccination strategy called “prime and pull” informed the development of a vaccine currently in a clinical trial to treat women with precancerous lesions in the cervix to prevent cervical cancer.

Dr. Iwasaki earned a BS in Biochemistry, with a minor in Physics, and a PhD in Immunology, all from the University of Toronto, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health. In 2022, she was awarded a Sterling Professorship, the highest academic honor professors receive at Yale University.

She is an elected member of the council for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the American Association of Immunologists (AAI), and an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Microbiology, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, and CASE. Iwasaki has received multiple awards to date, including the Inspiring Yale Award, the Seymour & Vivian Milstein Award for Excellence in Interferon and Cytokine Research, the Charles W. Bohmafalk Teaching Award, AAI’s Thermo Fisher Meritorious Career Award, and BD Biosciences Investigator Award, to name a few. For more, see Dr. Iwasaki’s Yale profile.

Dr. Iwasaki and her husband, fellow Yale faculty member Ruslan Mezhitov, have two children and reside in Connecticut.

In 2017, CASE received one of nine planning grants awarded by the California Council for Science and Technology (CCST) in partnership with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Simons Foundation. The grants supported state-level planning for the implementation of a science and technology policy fellowship program, with the American Association for the Advancement of Science and CCST Policy Fellowship Programs as successful models from which to build. The fellowships provide opportunities for scientists, physicians, and engineers with PhD’s or equivalent terminal degrees to contribute their skills and knowledge to the development of science-related public policies while simultaneously learning about the public policy process.

CASE began the planning phase by establishing a Fellowship Advisory Committee that included representatives from the state government, former and current fellows, CASE Members, and foundations. The committee provided guidance for the development of the program.

The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) provided the first opportunity to place a CASE Fellow in spring 2019. Dr. Anna Hagstrom served as the Inaugural Fellow and completed her two-year fellowship as a member of DEEP’s emerging contaminants/per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) team. Seema Alim is DEEP’s second fellow and will focus on Building Decarbonization.