Dr. Carl Rhodes, a senior scientific officer at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), will be coming to visit The Pub Club on July 17.  For those of you not familiar with Dr. Rhodes, here are a couple excerpts from a 2013 Nature Feature article describing Dr. Rhodes:
“He helps the institution to select and review new investigators, who are funded by the HHMI but based at universities. Until recently, he also helped to plan and run seven scientific meetings a year.”

“Rhodes started his teaching and administration career at Stanford University in California, where he focused on “things other faculty didn’t want to do”, he says, such as coordinating teaching assistants, refining the curriculum and dealing with the occasional disciplinary problem. He viewed himself as a service provider. “I made myself useful,” he says.  In that role, Rhodes developed key skills and insights that would serve him well in a later job as a grants officer at the NIH, where he managed a review panel that evaluated joint PhD–medical doctorate programmes. It was also useful later on: sifting through 1,000 graduate-school applications at a time at Stanford was at least as difficult as triaging hundreds of new-investigator applications at the HHMI, he says. He now oversees scientific advisory panels that evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each investigator’s application and the contributions that they would make to their fields. The review officer combines the panel’s comments into a single document — and all the documents go through Rhodes for final approval.”