Nevin Summers, Executive Director of the MIT Synthetic Biology Center and Research Scientist in the MIT Weiss Lab, has been appointed for a three year term to the inaugural National Leadership Council of the Society for Science & the Public, the organization that has promoted scientific literacy, STEM education and scientific research since its founding in 1921.  

The Society publishes the magazine, Science News, and organizes the nation's most prestigious high school science competitions: the Intel International Science & Engineering Fair (ISEF) and the Regeneron Science Talent Search (STS), which was formerly sponsored by Westinghouse and later Intel.  Nevin is an Alumnus of both competitions.

Since 1921, over 90,000 high school students have participated in the Society’s competitions, and some have gone on to become:

• 13 Nobel Prize winners

• 2 Fields Medal recipients

• 13 National Medal of Science recipients

• 2 Enrico Fermi Award winners

• 23 MacArthur Foundation Fellows

• 3 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award winners

• 5 Breakthrough Prize winners

• 11 National Academy of Engineering inductees

• 42 National Academy of Sciences inductees

• 56 Sloan Research Fellows