Frederick M. Bernthal

• Vice Chair, FRA Board of Directors for Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
• President, Universities Research Association, Washington, D.C.

Fred Bernthal was named President of Universities Research Association (URA) in 1994. A not-for-profit consortium of 88 major research universities, URA enables its members to cooperate in the planning, construction, and operation of large research facilities. As President of URA, Bernthal is responsible for the administration and governance of URA's activities, and for corporate relations with the Federal government, industry, academe, and the general public.

Prior to assuming his post at URA, Dr. Bernthal was appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate in 1990 as Deputy Director of the National Science Foundation. During his four years as Deputy he also served for one year as Acting Director of the Foundation. In 1988 he was nominated and confirmed to be Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans, Environment and Science, a post in which he served for two years. He chaired the 50-nation Response Strategies Working Group of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and he led the 1990 negotiation of the US-USSR Agreement for Cooperation in Basic Sciences.

In 1983 Dr. Bernthal was nominated and confirmed to be a Member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, where he drafted and gained approval for the Commission's first Advanced Reactor Policy Statement. In 1987 he led an interagency U.S. Nuclear Safety Delegation to the Soviet Union, where he negotiated and signed the first US-USSR nuclear safety protocol.

From 1970-80, Dr. Bernthal was a professor of chemistry and physics at Michigan State University and was granted tenure. On being named Congressional Science Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1978, he took a leave of absence from MSU to join the staff of Senator Howard Baker. In 1980 he was appointed Chief Legislative Assistant to then Senate Majority Leader Baker, on whose staff he continued to serve until 1983.

Fred Bernthal received a B.S. degree in chemistry from Valparaiso University in 1964, and a Ph.D. in nuclear chemistry in 1969 from the University of California at Berkeley. He did postdoctoral study at Yale University in 1969-70, and advanced study at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen where he was a NATO Senior Scientist Fellow in 1977. He is the author of some 45 scientific publications and numerous public policy papers.

Dr. Bernthal serves on the boards of PPL Corporation, a Fortune 400 energy company; Information Systems Laboratories Inc., a privately held San Diego-based technology services firm; and the Washington-based Society for Science and the Public, Inc. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the American Chemical Society and the Cosmos Club of Washington.