Wanda M. Austin PhD ’88 and John C. Martin have been elected to the USC Board of Trustees.

Austin is president and chief executive officer of The Aerospace Corp. Martin is chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Gilead Sciences Inc.

Austin has been with the Aerospace Corp. since 1979, serving in positions of increasing responsibility. A leading architect of the country’s national security space programs, the El Segundo-based corporation was established in 1960.

Before assuming her current post in January 2008, Austin was senior vice president of the company’s National Systems Group, headquartered in Chantilly, Va., which supports the national security space and intelligence community.

Austin is internationally recognized for her work in satellite and payload system acquisition, systems engineering and system simulation. She served on President Barack Obama’s Review of Human Spaceflight Plans Committee in 2009 and in 2010 was appointed to the Defense Science Board.

She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a member of the International Academy of Astronautics.

Austin earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Franklin and Marshall College, master’s degrees in systems engineering and mathematics from the University of Pittsburgh and a doctorate in systems engineering from USC in 1988.

At USC, Austin delivered the second annual Rechtin Keynote Lecture, hosted by the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering in 2008. She is also a member of the department’s research faculty and its visiting advisory committee.

Martin joined Gilead in 1990 as vice president for research and development and served as president and chief executive officer from 1996 to 2008. Headquartered in Foster City, Calif., Gilead is a research-based biopharmaceutical company.

He previously held leadership positions at Bristol-Myers Squibb and Syntex Corp., where he co-invented an antiviral drug that treats a type of herpes infection causing blindness in patients with AIDS.

Among other honors for his scientific work, Martin has received the Isbell Award from the American Chemical Society and the Gertrude B. Elion Award for Scientific Excellence from the International Society for Antiviral Research. In 2008, he was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering.

In recognition of his business acumen, CEOWORLD magazine named Martin one of the top CEOs in the world to watch for in 2010. In its January-February 2010 issue, Harvard Business Review included him on a list of the 100 best-performing chief executive officers in the world.

In addition to serving on the USC Board of Trustees, Martin is a member of the boards of directors of the California Healthcare Institute and Gen-Probe Inc.

Martin earned a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Chicago, an MBA in marketing from Golden Gate University and a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Purdue University.