Kentucky
Academy of Science Kentucky
Academy of Science 
Governor Steve Beshear’s choice to oversee Kentucky’s energy and environmental protection program is an internationally renowned chemical engineer with demonstrated leadership in research, academia, and management. Dr. Leonard Peters served for the past five years with Battelle Memorial Institute, a leading non-profit applied science and technology development company. During his tenure at Battelle, Dr. Peters was senior vice president and director of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where he oversaw a staff of 4,200. Under his leadership, he realigned the laboratory’s research priorities to meet the needs of its diverse customer base. Dr. Peters has held senior academic and administrative positions at leading universities, including Virginia Tech and the University of Kentucky. He holds a doctorate in chemical engineering from the University of Pittsburgh and is a prolific author and lecturer. Dr. Peters has been recognized for his achievements with honors ranging from the National Science Foundation Award to the Oak Ridge Associated Universities’ Outstanding Leadership Award.
Graham Cooks was born in South Africa and received a Ph. D. at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg and also from Cambridge University, UK. He is a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Purdue University. His interests involve construction of mass spectrometers and their use in fundamental studies and applications. Early in his career, he worked on energy partitioning during metastable ion fragmentation and contributed to the concept and implementation of tandem mass spectrometry and to desorption ionization, especially matrix-based methods. His interest in minimizing sample work-up and avoiding chromatography contributed to the development of the ambient ionization methods, including desorption electrospray ionization (DESI). Applications of this method in tissue imaging, forensics and pharmaceutics are in progress. These same interests also led to the construction of miniature ion trap mass spectrometers and their application to problems of trace chemical detection. His interests in the fundamentals of ion chemistry include chiral analysis and spontaneous chiral resolution in clusters and the possible role of the amino acid serine in the biochemical origins of life. Graham Cooks is a past President of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry and the International Mass Spectrometry Society and a Life Member of the British Mass Spectrometry Society. He has had the pleasure of working with several hundred collaborators from around the world including a hundred Ph. D. students..
Margaret M. Hanson received her Ph.D. degree in Astrophysics from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1995. That same year she was awarded a Hubble Space Telescope Post-doctoral Fellowship, used to fund a three year appointment at Steward Observatory, at the University of Arizona, in Tucson. She began her position as assistant professor of physics at the University of Cincinnati in 1998. She is now full professor of physics. Her research activities involve near-infrared spectral studies of stars with high mass and the massive clusters which form them. She has over 50 publications in scientific journals and has been awarded numerous national grants for her work totaling nearly a million dollars. She has been granted time on some of the largest and most competitive telescopes in the world, such as the 8-meter Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and most recently on the ESO Very Large Telescope, also 8-meter class, located in Northern Chile. In 2002, Dr. Hanson was awarded the Edith C. Alexander Award for Excellence in Teaching from the McMicken College of Arts & Science. She was honored in 2003 as a Leading Women in Cincinnati for her science outreach work to girls and young women in the community. Presently, she is in her 5th year serving as the Associate Editor-in-Chief of The Astronomical Journal, one of the leading international journals for astrophysics.
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