John Wilbanks is the Senior Medical Director at

Biogen Biogen Inc. is an American multinational biotechnology company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, specializing in the discovery, development, and delivery of therapies for the treatment of neurological diseases to patients worldwide. History ...

, and formerly the Chief Commons Officer at

Sage Bionetworks Sage Bionetworks is a nonprofit organization in Seattle that promotes open science and patient engagement in the research process. It is led by Lara Mangravite. It was co-founded by Stephen Friend and Eric Schadt. Open science Sage Bionetworks ...

. Previously he was a Senior Fellow at the

Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation (Kauffman Foundation) is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, private foundation (United States), private foundation based in Kansas City, Missouri. It was founded in 1966 by Ewing Marion Kauffman, who had pre ...

and at

FasterCures The Milken Institute is an independent economic think tank based in Santa Monica, California with offices in Washington, DC, New York, Miami, London, Abu Dhabi, and Singapore. It publishes research and hosts conferences that apply market-based p ...

. He is known for his work on open science and research networks.

Education and career

Wilbanks grew up in

Knoxville Knoxville is a city in and the county seat of Knox County in the U.S. state of Tennessee. As of the 2020 United States census, Knoxville's population was 190,740, making it the largest city in the East Tennessee Grand Division and the state's ...

, Tennessee, US. He attended

Tulane University Tulane University, officially the Tulane University of Louisiana, is a private university, private research university in New Orleans, Louisiana. Founded as the Medical College of Louisiana in 1834 by seven young medical doctors, it turned into ...

and received a

Bachelor of Arts Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four years ...

philosophy Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some ...

in 1994. He also studied modern letters at the

Sorbonne Sorbonne may refer to: * Sorbonne (building), historic building in Paris, which housed the University of Paris and is now shared among multiple universities. *the University of Paris (c. 1150 – 1970) *one of its components or linked institution, ...

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

. From 1994 to 1997, he worked in

Washington, DC ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan ...

as a legislative aide to Congressman Fortney "Pete" Stark. During this time Wilbanks was also a grassroots coordinator and fundraiser for the

American Physical Therapy Association The American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) is a U.S-based individual membership professional organization representing more than 100,000 member physical therapists, physical therapist assistants, and students of physical therapy. The nonpro ...

. Wilbanks was the

Berkman Center for Internet & Society The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society is a research center at Harvard University that focuses on the study of cyberspace. Founded at Harvard Law School, the center traditionally focused on internet-related legal issues. On May 15, 2008, ...

's first assistant director from the fall of 1998 to the summer of 2000. There he led efforts in software development and Internet-mediated learning, and was involved in the Berkman Center's work on

ICANN The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN ) is an American multistakeholder group and nonprofit organization responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of several databases related to the namespaces ...

. While at the Berkman Center, Wilbanks founded Incellico, Inc., a bioinformatics company that built semantic graph networks for use in pharmaceutical research and development. He served as President and

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...

, and led to the company's acquisition in the summer of 2003. He has also served as a Fellow at the

World Wide Web Consortium The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...

on Semantic Web for Life Sciences, was a visiting scientist in the Project on Mathematics and Computation at MIT, and was a member of the National Advisory Committee for

PubMed Central PubMed Central (PMC) is a free digital repository that archives open access full-text scholarly articles that have been published in biomedical and life sciences journals. As one of the major research databases developed by the National Center f ...

. He is a member of the Board of Directors for

and on the advisory boards of Genomera, Genomic Arts, and Boundless Learning. He is an original author of the

Panton Principles The ''Panton Principles'' are a set of principles which were written to promote open science. They were first drafted in July 2009 at the Panton Arms pub in Cambridge. History The principles were written by Peter Murray-Rust, Cameron Neylon, Ru ...

for sharing data. Wilbanks led a

We the People The Preamble to the United States Constitution, beginning with the words We the People, is a brief introductory statement of the Constitution's fundamental purposes and guiding principles. Courts have referred to it as reliable evidence o ...

petition supporting the free access of taxpayer-funded research data, which gained over 65,000 signatures. In February 2013, the

White House The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. It is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., and has been the residence of every U.S. president since John Adams in 1800. ...

responded, detailing a plan to freely publicize taxpayer-funded research data.

Consent to Research

Consent to Research (CtR) was a project that provides a platform for people to donate their health data for the purposes of scientific research and the advancement of medicine. Since health data is restricted and expensive, this project provided people the opportunity to freely donate information that can only positively benefit medicine and patients at large. Consent to Research was connected to the Access2Research project, which aimed to free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles that are already taxpayer-funded. Wilbanks founded the project in 2011 and gave a TED Global talk about the project in 2012.TED Global TED Conferences, LLC (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an American-Canadian non-profit media organization that posts international talks online for free distribution under the slogan "ideas worth spreading". TED was founded by Richard Sau ...

Education and career

Consent to Research

Science Commons

Footnotes

External links