Nitin Baliga is Director and Senior Vice President at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. Professor Baliga leads a cross-disciplinary team of scientists to address complex problems relevant to global health, personalized medicine, energy, and environment. His team uses a systems approach to construct predictive models of cellular and molecular networks within pathogens, cancer cells, and environmental microbes to enable biotechnologies to overcome drug resistance, find new drugs, predict consequence of climate change, and manufacture biorenewables. Dr. Baliga is also actively engaged in science education, and is passionate about developing and disseminating current science curriculum and authentic cross-disciplinary practices to schools. His contributions to HS education have had worldwide impact, and have won awards including the Alvin J. Thompson award.