Joel Bard, oboe

Joel got his B.M. in oboe at the Cleveland Institute of Music as a student of John Mack in 1983. He then studied oboe and orchestral conducting at The Juilliard School where he got his M.M. in 1986. His conducting teachers included Roger Nierenberg, Jorge Mester, and Sixten Ehrling and he has also worked with Charles Bruck, Otto Werner Muller, Gunther Schuller, Leonard Bernstein, and Herbert Blomstedt. After leaving school Joel was a freelance oboist and conductor in the Philadelphia and Boston areas and served on the faculty of the Longy School of Music in Cambridge. He was the director of the Repertory Orchestra at the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras from 1989 until 2011. As oboist and artistic advisor with the Kendall Square Orchestra he recently performed Mozart's Piano and Wind Quintet and Sinfonia Concertante with members of the Boston Symphony in the inaugural Symphony for Science at Symphony Hall as a benefit for the Frontotemporal Disorders Unit at MGH.

In 1989 he also began to pursue his interest in science more seriously, first at UMass Boston and then as a graduate student at Harvard. After getting his Ph.D in biochemistry in 1999 working on muscarinic signalling with Ernie Peralta, he did a postdoctoral fellowship in x-ray crystallography with Andrew Bohm at the Boston Biomedical Research Institute where he solved the structure of yeast poly-A polymerase. Since 2001 he has been working at Pfizer where he is currently focused on biotherapeutic informatics.