The Board of Directors of the
Massachusetts Life Sciences Center

Schedule of Board Meetings

 

Officers
Co-Chair, Secretary Greg Bialecki
Co-Chair, Secretary Leslie A. Kirwan

 

Greg Bialecki
Secretary, Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development

Secretary Greg Bialecki oversees the Commonwealth's business development, housing & community development, and consumer affairs & business regulations undersecretariats. As Governor Patrick's chief housing and economic development advisor and cabinet member, Secretary Bialecki has oversight of fourteen state agencies.

Prior to his appointment as Secretary of Housing and Economic Development, Bialecki served as the Undersecretary of Business Development. He also leads the Governor's Development Cabinet, which improves coordination across several Cabinet Secretariats involved in high level initiatives geared towards strengthening the Commonwealth's economic position.

He has been the architect of the Patrick-Murray Administration's Growth Districts Initiative, oversaw the implementation of the Massachusetts Opportunity Relocation & Expansion (MORE) Jobs capital program, and created an "Industry of the Month" series to strengthen relationships with key economic drivers in the state. Secretary Bialecki also served as the Commonwealth's first Permitting Ombudsman in which he executed the Chapter 43D Expedited Permitting Program and chaired the Interagency Permitting Board.

Before joining the Patrick-Murray Administration, Bialecki enjoyed a twenty year career as a real estate development and environmental lawyer at the law firms of Hill & Barlow and DLA Piper Rudnick, where his work focused on the major urban redevelopment projects in the Greater Boston area. He also worked extensively with public agencies, non-profit organizations and private landowners on land conservation and open space protection matters throughout the Commonwealth. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

Secretary Leslie A. Kirwan
Secretary, Executive Office for Administration and Finance

Secretary Leslie A. Kirwan joins the Patrick-Murray Administration as Secretary of Administration and Finance with over 23 years of leadership and impact in state, local and transportation finance. She is recognized for partnering with cities and towns in solving difficult municipal finance problems and for her experience in a wide range of Commonwealth policy and management responsibilities. In her most recent job as chief financial officer at the Massachusetts Port Authority, Leslie led the most significant financial recovery among U.S. airports in response to 9/11.

Secretary Kirwan has direct experience with the responsibilities of her new cabinet post, having served as Undersecretary and Chief of Staff of the Executive Office of Administration and Finance from 1995 to 1997. In that role, she assisted the Secretary in a broad range of operational and policy issues; coordinated the state's revenue optimization effort, which netted $85 million in its first two years; and led A & F’s relations with local government.

Prior to joining A & F, she spent over ten years as a manager in the Department of Revenue’s Division of Local Services, where she led Division staff in execution of key responsibilities including: overseeing local budget management; local aid analysis and distribution (the “Cherry Sheet”); coordinating state response to local financial emergencies, including developing and securing legislative solutions including imposition of several fiscal control boards; oversight of local assessing and tax administration, enforcement of Proposition 2 ½; supervision of local accounting and cash management practices; and municipal law assistance. Her work with cities and towns received recognition including two awards from the Massachusetts Municipal Association.

Secretary Kirwan holds an A.B. from Harvard-Radcliffe and a Master of Public Policy degree from the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. She lives in Arlington with her husband and two teenaged sons.

Jack Wilson, PhD
President, University of Massachusetts

Jack Wilson is the 25th President of the University of Massachusetts system, serving since September 2, 2003.

Prior to becoming President, he served as the Vice President for Academic Affairs of The University of Massachusetts system and CEO of UMassOnline. Formerly, Wilson was the J. Erik Jonsson '22 Distinguished Professor of Physics, Engineering Science, Information Technology, and Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where he had also served as a Dean and interim Provost. Prior to that he served as the head of a scientific society (AAPT) in Washington, DC and as a Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland.

Wilson has authored over 55 scholarly articles, wrote or edited five books, and given over 200 invited lectures. He has enjoyed over $23 million in funding for his research and scholarly activities. Wilson is nationally and internationally known for his leadership in the reform of higher education programs. He has also been a successful entrepreneur, as he founded a software company and took it through several rounds of venture capital and two mergers into a public company on the NASDAQ exchange.

As the founding CEO of UMassOnline, he helped to build UMassOnline into one of the largest externally directed online programs in the United States. Wilson was also the founder, CEO, and Chairman of the LearnLinc Corporation, founded in 1993.

His strong interest in the links between higher education and economic development led to becoming the co-founder of the Paul Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship, the creator of a national workshop series for technology enhanced entrepreneurship education for university faculty, a national advisory committee member for the Kauffman Entrepreneurship Fellowship Program, and a member of the Massachusetts Legislature's Science, and Technology Caucus. He served on the core internal steering group with MassInsight, the Mass High Technology Council, and other organizations in the development of a Science and Technology Roadmap for Massachusetts. He has served as a consultant to many computing and communications firms including IBM, AT&T, Lucent, Hewlett Packard, and Boeing Flight Safety International.

Marc D. Beer
Former President and Chief Executive Officer, ViaCell, Inc.

Marc D. Beer joined ViaCell in April 2000 as the founding President and Chief Executive Officer, bringing over 17 years of experience in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and diagnostics. Prior to ViaCell, he held marketing and business development roles at Genzyme Corporation, most recently serving as Vice President of Global Marketing. In this role, he was responsible for global marketing and business development activities within Genzyme’s therapeutics division. Before Genzyme he was Vice President, Sales at Biostar, Inc. and held a variety of sales and marketing roles in the pharmaceutical and diagnostic devices divisions of Abbott Laboratories. He also serves on the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) Emerging Companies Section Governing Body. Mr. Beer holds a B.S. from Miami University.

Josh Boger, Ph.D.
CEO, Vertex Pharmaceuticals

Dr. Joshua Boger is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Vertex Pharmaceuticals Incorporated.
He has been the Company’s CEO since 1992, and also served in the additional role of Chairman of the Board from 1997 until 2006. Dr. Boger served as Vertex’s Chief Scientific Officer from 1989 until 1992 and has been a Director since Vertex’s inception.
Dr. Boger holds a B.A. in chemistry and in philosophy from Wesleyan University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry from Harvard University. His postdoctoral research in molecular recognition was performed in the laboratories of the Nobel-prize winning chemist, Jean-Marie Lehn in Strasbourg, France.
Prior to founding Vertex in 1989, Dr. Boger held the position of Senior Director of Basic Chemistry at Merck Sharp & Dohme Research Laboratories in Rahway, New Jersey, where he headed both the Department of Medicinal Chemistry of Immunology & Inflammation and the Department of Biophysical Chemistry.

 

Peter L. Slavin
President, Massachusetts General Hospital

Peter L. Slavin, MD is the President of Massachusetts General Hospital and Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Slavin graduated from Harvard College in 1979, Harvard Medical School in 1984, and Harvard Business School in 1990.

He did his training in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1984 to 1987.  While on staff at MGH, he attended Harvard Business School and developed the hospital’s first quality and utilization management program.  In 1994, he was appointed as Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer.

In 1997, he was recruited to serve as the first president of the recently merged Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, the adult teaching hospital of the Washington University Medical Center.  In 1999, he returned to Boston to serve as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Massachusetts General Physicians Organization, which included over 1,700 physicians and employed nearly 1,000 of them.  

In January 2003, he was appointed to his current position.  Massachusetts General Hospital is the third oldest hospital in the United States and is the largest Harvard teaching hospital.  MGH operates over 900 inpatient beds, has an annual operating budget of over $1.9 billion per year, is the largest employer in the City of Boston, and has the largest research program (over $500 million per year) of any hospital in the United States.
Dr. Slavin teaches internal medicine at MGH and health care management at Harvard Medical School.

Lydia Villa-Komaroff, Ph.D.
Board Member and Chief Scientific Officer, Cytonome/ST

Lydia Villa-Komaroff is a Board Member and Chief Scientific Officer for Cytonome/ST, a company building the first optical cell sorter capable of supporting rapid, sterile sorting of human cells for therapeutic use. She began her research career under the tutelage of David Baltimore and Harvey Lodish at MIT, and received a Ph.D. in Cell Biology in 1975. Her professional life includes research positions at Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, Cold Spring Harbor, Children's Hospital in Boston, and Cytonome, Inc. During the discovery phase of her career, she published over 70 research articles and reviews. In 1996 she moved to full time administration; from 1998 to 2003 she was Vice President for Research at Northwestern University in Illinois and from 2003 to 2005 she served as Vice President for Research and Chief Operating Officer of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge. In 2003 she was appointed to the Board of Directors of Transkaryotic Therapies, Inc (TKT), a biopharmaceutical company that developed products for the treatment of rare diseases. She became non-executive Chair of the Board in January 2005. She joined Cytonome, Inc as Chief Scientific Officer in 2005 and became CEO in 2006.

She is a member of the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Hall of Fame and a fellow of the Association for Women in Science. She has served on review committees for the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. She was a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Assessing the System for Protecting Human Research Subjects, the National Research Council Committee on the Structure of NIH, the congressionally mandated National Science Foundation Committee on Equal Opportunity in Science and Engineering, as well as the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for the Biology Directorate, which she chaired from 1997 to 1998. She was a member of the National Advisory Neurological Disorders and Stroke Council from 2000 to 2004 and was elected to a four year term on the Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2001. She is a founding member of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science and has been both a board member and vice president of the organization. She became Chair of the Board of Trustees for Pine Manor College in May 2007. She is currently serving on the National Academies of Science and National Academy of Engineering Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and the National Research Council Committee on Underrepresented Groups and the Expansion of the Science and Engineering Workforce Pipeline.