Chris Goodwin, President
Chris Goodwin works for the Goodwin Motor Group, a five-dealership automobile group owned and operated by the Goodwin family for more than 80 years. Prior to working for the family business, Goodwin practiced law for ten years, first in Maryland and later in Maine. He is involved with numerous local nonprofits, including the Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick, Maine, where he is the most recent former President; Maine State Music Theater, operating summer musical theater out of Bowdoin College’s historic Pickard Theater; and Community Ice, seeking to build a community ice arena to serve the greater Brunswick and Midcoast Maine regions. Goodwin became involved with Cornerstones of Science through his relationship with founder Lee Grodzins, as the two worked together to transition Cornerstones from a program of Curtis Memorial Library to a separate non-profit entity. Goodwin lives in Brunswick, Maine, with his wife, Alyssa, and two children, Hazel and Felix.
Dean Grodzins, Interim Vice-President
Dean Grodzins has served as a Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard University, Senior Researcher at the Harvard Business School, and Associate Professor of History at Meadville Lombard Theological School. He has been a Pew Faculty Fellow at Yale University and a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society. He is the former editor of the Journal of Unitarian Universalist History (1995-2010) and the creator of the prize-winning comic strip, TANGENTS (1979-2000).
Dean is the author of American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism (UNC, 2002), which won the Allan Nevins Prize among other honors, and many articles and book chapters. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Journal of American History, The Journal of Religion, The Massachusetts Historical Review, and The Root, among other publications. He is a contributor to The Atlas of Boston History (Chicago, 2019) and edited the book A Language of Reverence (Meadville, 2004). He has given many public talks and presentations on historical subjects.
Seven case studies on the history of American democracy, which Dean co-wrote with Prof. David A. Moss of Harvard and others, are being used by thousands of high school students across the United States and were published in Moss, Democracy: A Case Study (Harvard, 2017). He and Moss also co-wrote “The U.S. Secession Crisis as a Breakdown of Democracy,” in Moss, Archon Fung, and Odd Arne Westad, eds., When Democracy Breaks: Studies in Democratic Erosion and Collapse, from Ancient Athens to the Present Day (Oxford, 2024).
Hal Grodzins, Treasurer
Hal Grodzins is Chief Development Officer and a Director of Sabia, Inc., a global leader in the
manufacturing and marketing of Prompt Gamma Neutron Activation Analysis (PGNAA) technology.
A longtime instrumentation business executive, Mr. Grodzins has decades of experience in all
aspects of business management, including executive management, M&A, strategic planning,
technology development and global business development.
Prior to joining Sabia, Mr. Grodzins was Cofounder, Chairman, President and CEO of Viken Detection Corporation, a pioneer in homeland security x-ray imaging and analytical devices; former Chairman, President and CEO of Niton Corp., the company that invented handheld x-ray instrumentation; former Managing Director of Niton Europe GmbH and Niton Asia Ltd.; former Executive Consultant to the CEO of the Rigaku Group of Companies; Founder of Rigaku Analytical Devices, Inc.; and former Vice President of Research and Development of the instrumentation division of Thermo Fisher Scientific. Prior to joining the instrumentation industry, Mr. Grodzins worked as bond trader–broker at a boutique Wall Street firm, Stoever Glass & Co. Mr. Grodzins is former Chairman of the Fulcrum Foundation and a former
director of several private companies. He is the inventor and co–inventor of patents in x-ray fluorescence and optical emission spectroscopy; winner of the 2003 R&D 100 Award as principal designer of Niton’s XLt Series XRF analyzers; and winner of national awards for sales and product presentation.
Mr. Grodzins resides in Arlington, Massachusetts.
Jocelyn Hubbell, Member
Jocelyn Hubbell is the Interpretive Specialist and webmaster for the Maine Bureau of Parks and Lands. Her duties include the production of color guides and maps, the monthly newsletter, a weekly Nature Note, grant writing, and the development of nature programs. Jocelyn has previous experience as both a law enforcement ranger/naturalist and environmental educator with the City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks, where her fieldwork included helping to research and educate the public about the bats, bears, and wildcats of the Front Range.
In NYC she worked for the American Museum of Natural History as a contract writer and gained experience working with exotic animals as Senior Educator for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Prospect Park Wildlife Center. In Maine, she taught and managed environmental education programs for Maine Audubon as their Camps and Outreach Program Manager. Jocelyn was the first Executive Director of Cornerstones of Science and is the author of the children’s book Know-It-Alls: Frogs. She holds a BS degree in Outdoor Recreation with a concentration in Environmental Interpretation from Colorado State University and master’s level work in both landscape architecture and kinesiology from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Cathy Burack, Member
Cathy Burack is a Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for Youth and Communities (CYC) in the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University.
Cathy works with universities, foundations, and community organizations to use evaluation to both “prove” and “improve” their programs. Her research and capacity-building efforts attend to both outcomes, impact, and systemic change. To that end Cathy has conducted evaluations of campus-based change initiatives including conducting a national evaluation of institutional support for civic engagement, developing measures of student success, helping establish a national data collection and reporting system, and conducting multi-site evaluations of campus-wide change initiatives. Examples of some of Cathy’s projects include helping Girls Who Code increase their evaluation capacity; the evaluation of Campus Compact’s Connect to Complete (C2C) initiative, a pilot peer-support program at nine community colleges funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; the GreenLight Fund’s Social Innovation Fund initiative evaluation; the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation’s Community College Transfer Initiative, an initiative designed to enable low- and moderate-income, academically able, community college students to transfer to selective colleges and universities; the Nellie Mae Education Foundation’s Project Compass, a program focused on the retention of underserved students; and a longitudinal study on the impact of participating in FIRST®, a national after school robotics program.
Cathy served as a Brandeis University Ombuds from 2017-2019, and she chaired the Heller School’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee which hired the first Associate Dean for Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity. Cathy holds an Ed.D. in Administration, Planning and Social Policy from Harvard University.
Steve Weems
Steve Weems joined the Cornerstones of Science Board of Directors in 2019 and became treasurer in 2020. Currently, Steve is the Executive Director of the Solar Energy Association of Maine (SEAM), a broad coalition of solar energy interests advocating for the development of solar energy projects of all sizes and types, as a key component of the clean energy infrastructure necessary to decarbonize Maine’s economy. SEAM’s work is both educational and policy-oriented, working with legislators, as an intervenor in regulatory proceedings, and on other fronts to improve the policy and economic framework for solar energy.
Steve is the managing Director of Polaris Associates, a consulting and financial packaging firm he founded in 2008. Polaris focuses on business and organizational development, community development, and project financing. Previously he founded CEI Capital Management LLC (CCML, 2003), where he served as Managing Director. CCML specializes in the use of the federal New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) program to finance major projects in low-income areas, with specific provisions to benefit the people living in those areas.
Steve has held other key management positions in the private, public, and not-for-profit sectors. These include President and COO of Schiavi Leasing Corporation, a turnkey provider of commercial modular space; Executive Vice President & COO of Resource Conservation Services, an organic materials recycling company; Vice President of Corporate Lending for a subsidiary of the Bank of Boston; co-founder and Executive Vice President of the Maine Development Foundation, a statewide 501(c)(3) economic development corporation; founder and Supervisor of a Division of Economic Planning & Analysis at the former Maine State Planning Office. He has served on numerous boards and commissions including recent service as a Trustee of Bigelow laboratory for Ocean Sciences and the Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority, which is redeveloping the former Brunswick Naval Air Station. A transplanted “flat-lander,” Steve has lived and worked in Maine for 46 years.
Lee Grodzins, Founder of Cornerstones of Science
Lee Grodzins (1926-2025) – Lee was an experimental nuclear physicist who served as a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1959 to 1998. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1964-65 and in 1971-72, an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in 1980-81, and in 1998, was awarded an honorary Sci.D. from Purdue University. Lee authored or co-authored more than 170 articles and was awarded over 60 US patents. He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences. He founded Niton Corporation in 1987 to develop and market hand-held instruments for analyzing toxic elements in the environment. When Niton became part of ThermoFisher Scientific Corporation in 2005, he became the Director of advanced products for portable elemental analysis. His instruments have won R&D 100 awards in 1995, 2003 and 2008, and in 2021, his work was honored with the Birks Prize in X-Ray Florescence Technology. Lee was one of the founding members of the Union of Concerned Scientists and its President in 1971-72. More details about Lee. The Lee Grodzins Postdoctoral Award.
