Edward D. Miller, M.D., was named chief executive officer of Johns Hopkins Medicine, the 13th dean of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and vice president for medicine of The Johns Hopkins University in January 1997. His appointment followed a year-long national search for the first-ever CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine, a new organization that formally integrates operations and planning of the School of Medicine with The Johns Hopkins Health System and Hospital.

Miller, an anesthesiologist who has authored or co-authored more than 150 scientific papers, abstracts and book chapters, joined Hopkins in 1994 as professor and chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine, a post he held until May 1999. He was named interim dean of the School of Medicine in 1996. He came to Hopkins after eight years at Columbia University in New York, where he served as professor and chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology in the College of Physicians and Surgeons. Prior to that, he spent 11 years at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where he rose from assistant professor to professor of anesthesiology and surgery and medical director of the Surgical Intensive Care Unit.  Miller's research has focused on the cardiovascular effects of anesthetic drugs and vascular smooth muscle relaxation.

Born in February 1943 in Rochester, N.Y., Miller received his A.B. from Ohio Wesleyan University and his M.D. from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. He was a surgical intern at University Hospital in Boston, chief resident in anesthesiology at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, and a research fellow in physiology at the Harvard Medical School. In 1981-82, he spent a sabbatical year as senior scientist in the Department of Pharmacology and Physiology of Hopital Necker in Paris. A board member of United Way of Central Maryland, he is also a member of the State of Maryland's Council on Cancer Control and Health Care Access and Cost Commission. He and his wife, Lynne, have four children.

Dr. Randall M. Packard received his undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1967 and his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin in 1976.  He is currently the William H. Welch Professor of the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Prior to coming to Hopkins, Dr. Packard was the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of African History at Emory College, and Professor of International Health at the Rollins School of Public Health. He has also held numerous professorships of history throughout his career and has written extensively on the history of disease, public health, and medicine.  Dr. Packard is currently the editor of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, a leading journal in its field on the social, cultural, and scientific aspects of the history of medicine worldwide.  For our 75th Anniversary Celebration, he will discuss the history of the William H. Welch Medical Library.

Peter Agre, M.D. Professor, Biological Chemistry Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Peter Agre, M.D., winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and professor of biological chemistry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, will present the keynote speech.

The body's cells must contain specific channels for transporting water. This has been suspected since the middle of the nineteenth century. However, it was not until 1988 that Peter Agre succeeded in isolating a membrane protein that, he somewhat later realized, must be the long-sought-after water channel. This decisive discovery opened the door to a whole series of biochemical, physiological, and genetic studies of water channels in bacteria, plants, and mammals. Today, researchers can follow a water molecule on its way through the cell membrane and understand why only water, and not other small molecules or ions, can pass.

Born in Northfield, Minnesota., in 1949, Agre went to Theodore Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis, and in 1970 earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry from Augsburg College in that city. He received his medical doctorate from Johns Hopkins in 1974. In 1981, after post-graduate medical training and then a fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Agre returned to Hopkins, where he progressed through the ranks of the departments of medicine and cell biology. In 1993, he was recruited by then-department director Daniel Lane, Ph.D., to become a professor in the department of biological chemistry, a position he still holds.

Agre was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 2000 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. He holds two U.S. patents on the isolation, cloning and expression of aquaporins 1 and 5 and is the principal investigator on four current National Institutes of Health grants.

More on Peter Agre’s Nobel Prize.

David G.  Nichols, M.D., M.B.A. Vice Dean for Education Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Dr. David G. Nichols received his undergraduate degree from Yale University in 1973 and his medical school degree from New York's Mount Sinai School of Medicine in 1979. He also earned an MBA from Johns Hopkins University School of Professional Studies in Business and Education in 2000. He is a pediatric anesthesiologist trained at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dr. Nichols has been a professor of Anesthesiology/Critical Care Medicine and Pediatrics at Johns Hopkins since 1998. An outstanding teacher, he has won awards from both the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins for his pedagogical abilities. Among his myriad responsibilities, Dr. Nichols also finds time to chair the Welch Library Advisory Committee.

Nancy Roderer, M.L.S., AHIP Director, Welch Medical Library Associate Professor and Interim Director, Division of Health Sciences Informatics

Ms. Roderer is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Biomedical Information Sciences of Johns Hopkins University and serves as the Director of the Welch Medical Library and the Interim Director of the Division.  Ms. Roderer is a graduate of the University of Dayton (Mathematics and Computer Science) and the University of Maryland (Library and Information Services and Computer Science).  She has pursued her interests in understanding and facilitating information use and in integrated information management through both operational and research activities at Columbia and Yale Universities, including service as Co-Principal Investigator of IAIMS projects at both institutions.  She is currently working on a number of fronts on questions related to providing human support to users interacting with digital libraries.