John Wilbanks is the Head of Product, Data Sciences Platform Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Senior Fellow at the Datasphere Initiative. He was formerly the Head of Data at Biogen Digital Health, the co-founder and Chief Commons Officer at Sage Bionetworks, and the Executive Director at Science Commons. He served as a Senior Fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and at FasterCures.
He is known for his work on informed consent, open science, and research networks. Wilbanks led a We the People petition supporting the free access of taxpayer-funded research data, which gained over 65,000 signatures. In February 2013, the White House responded, detailing a plan to freely publicize taxpayer-funded research data.
Scientific American featured Wilbanks in “The Machine That Would Predict The Future” in 2011. Seed magazine named Wilbanks among their Revolutionary Minds of 2008, as a “Game Changer”, and the Utne Reader named him in 2009 as one of “50 visionaries who are changing your world”. He frequently campaigns for wider adoption of open-access publishing in science, and the increased sharing of data by scientists.
