April, 16, 2004

            The School of Science honors distinguished alumni and two graduates from the Department of Chemistry are being honored at a special recognition banquet on April 16.  The two award winners from Chemistry are Elaine Heron and Alan Levy.

Elaine J. Heron

B.S. 1970; Ph.D 1974, Chemistry

Elaine Heron is Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Labcyte Inc., a company that provides instruments and plastic consumables for life science research and development. In July 2001 she joined Picoliter Inc., which merged with Labcyte LLC to form Labcyte Inc. Dr. Heron was previously General Manager of the Molecular Biology Division of Applied Biosystems and a corporate vice president of Applera Corporation (formerly Perkin-Elmer). This division had revenues of $1 billion and was responsible for the systems used to sequence the vast majority of the human genome, as well as products for analyzing gene expression and genetic differences among individuals, identifying criminals based on their DNA, and resequencing HIV to enable understanding of drug resistance. She is also a director of BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc. Dr. Heron holds an MBS from the Presidential/Key Executive Program of Pepperdine University. She served as a member of the School of Science Dean’s Leadership Council from 1999 to 2002.

Alan J. Levy