Flomenberg, Hardin, and Rhodes Named Outstanding Science Alumni

8 November 2006—Three Eberly College of Science alumni were honored last week with the Outstanding Science Alumni Awards. These awards were established by the Board of Directors of the Eberly College of Science Alumni Society in 1997 to recognize outstanding science alumni for their leadership in science and for the impact they have had, and will continue to have, on society and on their professions. It recognizes alumni who have a record of significant professional achievements in their field and who are outstanding role models for the current students in the college.

Neal Flomenberg is the director of the Hematologic Malignancies and Blood & Marrow Transplant Program, as well as interim chairman of the Department of Medical Oncology, at Thomas Jefferson University’s Kimmel Cancer Center. He has served as the head of the Hematologic Malignancies Program since he joined Jefferson in 1994, at which time he initiated the blood-and-marrow transplantation efforts there. He has served as head of the Medical Oncology Division since 2001. He also is a professor of medicine and of microbiology and immunology at Jefferson Medical College and is an accomplished researcher interested in ways to make allogeneic transplants safer and more widely available to patients who lack donors within their families. He is working on methods to prevent graft-versus-host disease and to speed immune-system recovery after transplant.

Flomenberg has received many teaching and research awards and has published articles in numerous scientific and professional journals. He has held national offices in the American Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation and the Federation for Accreditation of Cellular Therapy. He was the Leukemia-Lymphoma Society’s 2003 Man of the Year for Eastern Pennsylvania. In 2006, he received a joint lifetime-achievement award from the Leukemia-Lymphoma Society’s Eastern Pennsylvania and Southern New Jersey chapters for his “contributions to mankind.”

Flomenberg received a bachelor’s degree from Penn State in 1974 and a doctor-of-medicine degree from Jefferson Medical College in 1976 through the joint Jefferson-Penn State accelerated medical-degree program. He trained in hematology and oncology at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center beginning in 1979 and remained on the faculty there as assistant and associate attending physician and as assistant and associate professor at Cornell University Medical College in New York until 1991. He served as director of the Bone Marrow Transplant Program and as professor of medicine and microbiology at the Medical College of Wisconsin from 1991 to 1994, before returning to Thomas Jefferson University.

Susan Hardin is founder, president, and chief executive officer of VisiGen Biotechnologies, Inc., in Houston, Texas. VisiGen is one of Houston’s leading-edge bionano-technology companies. Her work is enabling new-platform technologies to revolutionize biomolecular sequencing. VisiGen is developing and commercializing a radically new method of sequencing DNA that is projected to completely sequence a human genome in a day for approximately $1,000, which starkly contrasts to the current state of the art of six-to-nine months and $10-$25 million. This technology may be key to enabling the promise of personalized medicine. VisiGen’s research-and-development efforts are supported primarily by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Institutes of Health, and private investments by Applied Biosystems and SeqWright, Inc.

Hardin holds several patents, has authored or co-authored a number of publications, and frequently is an invited speaker at conferences. In 2004, she was honored as one of the “Top Houston Women in Technology” by the Association for American Women in Computing. She was named a member of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering College of Fellows in 2006. Previously, she was a member of the National Science Foundation’s DNA/Biomolecular Computing advisory panel and of the Academic Research Infrastructure Instrumentation and Instrument Development advisory panel.

Hardin earned her doctoral degree at Indiana University, Bloomington, in 1987 and completed her postdoctoral work at Brandeis University. She is an adjunct professor in the Department of Biology and Biochemistry and in the College of Technology at the University of Houston, where she joined the faculty in 1995.

F. Matthew Rhodes recently was appointed chief executive officer of Teranetics, Inc., a privately-held semiconductor company that provides next-generation, standards-based 10-gigabit Ethernet copper-channel solutions. Prior to joining Teranetics, Rhodes was president of Conexant Systems, Inc. In 1997, he joined Conexant, then named Rockwell Semiconductor System, where he directed the development and market introduction of low-cost modem technology for inclusion in laptop and desktop personal computers. In 1999, he was appointed senior vice president of the Personal Computing Division and was part of the management team that spun off Conexant from Rockwell. At that time, Rhodes transitioned the focus of the development to broadband-Internet-access technology and led Conexant to a market-leading position in the supply of digital-subscriber-line (DSL) solutions.

Prior to 1997, Rhodes was Director of Very-Large-Scale-Integration (VLSI) Technology at Pacific Communication Sciences, Inc. (PCSI) where he was part of the team that developed a number of wireless system solutions, including the Personal-Handy-Phone System in Japan that was a precursor to today’s data-enabled cellular phones. He came to PCSI after spending a number of years conducting VLSI research as a staff member of the Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds several patents and has contributed a number of papers to professional journals.

Rhodes received a bachelor’s degree in physics from Penn State in 1979, a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Lehigh University in 1983, and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1996. Rhodes participates in a number of industry associations, including the Fabless Semiconductor Association, and he is a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy.

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