Moira Gunn
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Dr. Moira Gunn stands squarely at the nexus of technology, science and society.

Through her programs Tech Nation and BioTech Nation, she has interviewed over 3,000 people ­ from CEO¹s to researchers, from venture capitalists to politicians, from teachers to technophobes. Popular business guests have included such leaders as Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Google¹s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Microsoft¹s Steve Ballmer. But the story goes well beyond tech-business. From politics with Senator John McCain to poverty with Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, everyone plays a role - everyone is a piece of the puzzle.

More recently, Gunn has also reached into the world of biotech, interviewing the people who decode our DNA, seek cures for cancer, and hope to solve the energy crisis along the way. Her book: Welcome to BioTech Nation: My Unexpected Odyssey into the Land of Small Molecules, Lean Genes, and Big Ideas was named to the Best Science Books of 2007 by the Library Journal.

Both Tech Nation, and its regular segment BioTech Nation, play to a broad audience: heard nationwide on over 200 public radio stations, on NPR¹s XM-Sirius satellite radio channels NPR Now and NPR Talk, to 177 countries via Armed Forces Radio International, and to anyone anywhere over the Internet. And while an award-winning radio journalist, Gunn success in explaining and framing technology and science grows out of solid credentials: A former NASA scientist and engineer, Dr. Gunn earned a masters degree in Computer Science from Purdue University, where she was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering. She has had a long career in software and systems development, and she holds a software patent in scientific research. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, she will be recognized for her career achievements by Purdue University in May, 2009 with an honorary doctorate in science.

Dr. Gunn is also the Director of Information Systems Programs at the University of San Francisco, which also offers concentrations in Information Security and Biotechnology in addition to BSIS and MSIS degrees. For this work, she was named 2008 Educator of the Year by EE Times/Tech Insights.

Dr. Gunn is a Board Member Emeritus of the Tech Museum of Innovation in Silicon Valley, and a Member of the Advisory Boards of a number of
organizations, including the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, the Anita Borg Institute for Women & Technology, and the Trusted Computing Group.

Blog Entries by Moira Gunn

Words, Words, Words ... NASA, NASA, NASA

Posted April 20, 2010 | 17:38:14 (EST)

"Words, words, words" - that's what the cartoon character Butthead used to mumble when adults were speaking to him, and it all sounded like one big blur. It leapt to mind again, when I was trying to grasp what President Obama was saying about the big, new plan for NASA,...

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Friendly Ears ... and Not-So-Friendly Ears

Posted April 9, 2010 | 14:43:21 (EST)

Any stand-up comic will tell you -- you can have material that kills, but get the wrong audience, and it doesn't matter what you say. They're not buying you, no matter what.

The same scenario plays out every day on the so-called "news" channels on television and similar venues...

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The Cheese Sandwich Tweet

Posted May 12, 2009 | 18:24:08 (EST)

Back in the early days of blogging, which was not so long ago when you think about it, when people were pronouncing "blogging" verrrry slooooowly while making double quotes in the air with their fingers, there became something known as the "cheese sandwich blog."

As the story goes, one...

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Our Brains on Food & Other Tales of Modern Life

Posted May 1, 2009 | 13:42:47 (EST)

This week on Tech Nation, I interviewed Dr. David Kessler, the former Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and currently a professor at the University of California, San Francisco. He has spent the last seven years focusing on the content of American foods and asking why we...

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Global Information Systems: Doing "Good Beyond Good"

Posted April 22, 2009 | 14:40:04 (EST)

I teach a graduate course entitled "Global Information Systems," and in it we focus on data which informs us about the world. Now, I don't mean information which is available to the entire planet. That would be the Internet, which provides pretty much the same information to everyone, everywhere. No,...

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Moldova: Power to the People, Electronically Speaking

Posted April 13, 2009 | 13:44:11 (EST)

The news that some 10,000 to 15,000 young people met spontaneously in the capital of Moldova to protest recent and questionable elections was crowned physically by the storming of Moldova's Parliament and a breaching of the offices of its President. It was crowned in cyberspace as the embodiment of that...

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A Moral Calculus: Pfizer & Nigeria

Posted April 6, 2009 | 16:48:15 (EST)

National Book Award for Fiction winner William T. Vollmann is wildly prolific on many fronts, but is arguably best known as the creator of a "moral calculus" which considers the right and wrong of numerous acts of human violence. In seven long and considered volumes entitled Rising Up and Rising...

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