Dr. Huang is the AAAS President and Program Chair for the Annual Meeting. She is Senior Faculty Associate in Biology at the California Institute of Technology, a distinguished virologist, and a proponent for women in science. Dr. Huang was previously a professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at Harvard Medical School, and subsequently dean for science at New York University. She is particularly interested in interdisciplinary research, the organization of higher educational institutions, and in policy issues related to education, science, and technology. She was the first to purify and characterize defective interfering viral particles. Her suggestion that these particles play a major role in viral pathogenesis stimulated work on many viral systems including plant viruses, and has led to the possibility of using these particles for disease prevention. Her work at the Salk Institute and MIT with David Baltimore on vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) led the way to his Nobel Prize-winning discovery of reverse transcriptase. Because of her work, VSV has become a model virus for many research studies. She is a fellow of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, American Women in Science, the Academy of Microbiology, and the AAAS, and has consulted on science policy for government agencies in Singapore, Taiwan, and China. She received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in microbiology from Johns Hopkins University.