Ellis Rubinstein,
President, NY Academy of Sciences:
Catalyst for Excitement About
Science in Schools
By Joan Baum, Ph.D.
Though on the job for only two and a half years, Ellis Rubinstein,
the dynamic president of the 188-year old New York Academy
of Science (NYAS), has been on the go constantly, enhancing,
innovating, prompting, prodding, his energy and enthusiasm
nowhere more apparent than in what he and his science and education
partners have been instituting in the way of initiatives to
generate excitement over physics, chemistry and biology in
New York City high school students, including encouraging participation
in The Laureates of Tomorrow Nobel Essay Contest, which the
NYAS administers in conjunction with the Swedish Consulate
in New York and The New York City Department of Education (DOE)
Calling the Academy’s 2005 Presidential Reception in
honor of the winners of the First Annual Nobel Essay competition
a new campaign to “Catalyze Science In Our Schools,” Ellis
Rubinstein expressed delight at having more involvement with
the DOE in its efforts to advance and extend science education,
particularly in underserved communities. Although he had just
returned from a related awards ceremony earlier in the day
and was getting ready for more celebratory activities in the
evening, he spoke at length and with great enthusiasm about
programs centered at the Academy, new and continuing, designed
to inspire science teachers and their students. Of course,
the NYAS continues its mission to “advance the understanding
of science, technology, and medicine, and to stimulate new
ways to think about how their research is applied in society
and the world,” but the words hardly approximate how
the director -- whose own career suggests he’s a hard
act to follow - has been moving to implement these goals among
professionals, prospective scientists and interested members
of the general public, or the degree of passion he feels for
New York City which he continually exclaims is the talent science
center of the world –“Eighteen Nobelists!”
A former editor of
Science and English major at UCLA Berkeley, Ellis Rubinstein
loves the term “turn-around,” his
specialty he feels, and is looking to exercise his skills in
New York, a city that can boast having an extraordinary number
of elite scientific professionals but that also must acknowledge
it does not adequately serve many communities, K-12, in science
and technology. He just hired a head of Educational Initiatives
to coordinate and publicize a wide variety of new NYAS-based
programs for teachers and for undergraduates, particularly
in conjunction with CUNY, who will meet at the Academy and
determine events and calendars, and he has also brought on
board someone to head up the Academy’s Minority Investigative
Network (a Women’s Investigative Network already addresses
scientific and pipeline issues.
Known for hosting “hot field” conferences for
top scientists and post-docs, symposia on timely, scientific
issues, including human rights for professionals abroad, and,
increasingly for its popular “e briefings” for
journalists, the Academy also continues to act as convener
of special discipline sections, including career mentoring
and interviewing -- a focus that has resulted in a surge of
membership (23,000 members in 150 countries) and a growing
success on the part of area universities to recruit graduate
and post doc students. The Academy also maintains its long-standing
commitment to offer summer internships to top-level metropolitan
area high school students in the sciences and engineering to
work in the laboratories of leading scientists, and to host
the well regarded NYC Science and Engineering Fair. But what
of those students in their junior year of high school who might
be persuaded to think about a career in science or in science
education? Ellis Rubinstein hopes that The Nobel Prize Essay
Contest will prove inspirational.
Seeing out his visitors,
the busy president cannot resist a turning into a reception
area where he has set up The Nobel Prize Education Games,
an interactive science literacy series NYAS administers on
its website at Nobelprize.org. One senses that if this cool,
smart master of many disciplines had a free moment, he’d
sit down to play. His own unusual career path, he notes,
was sparked by reaching for knowledge that he thought was
out of his range but that challenged him to learn.
