Jim Welch is the executive director of the Elizabeth R Griffin Research Foundation, a non-profit foundation that works globally with institutions and organizations promoting the strengthening of global health research capacity and the awareness of biosafety and biosecurity issues associated with that research. He also serves on the advisory board of the National Biosafety and Biocontainment Training Program at the National Institutes of Health. In his first career, Jim taught history for thirty years in the Kingsport, Tennessee public school system. His numerous teaching awards include his listing in Who’s Who in American Education, being named Tennessee’s Outstanding Teacher of the Humanities in 1998 and the Tennessee Council for Social Studies named him Outstanding Social Studies Teacher in Tennessee in 2002.