About

Richard Sever

Chief Science and Strategy Officer

Dr. Richard Sever is Chief Science and Strategy Officer of openRxiv and Co-Founder of the preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv. Richard studied for his undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford, graduating with 1st Class honours in Biochemistry. He then obtained a PhD from the University of Cambridge after performing research at hte MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.

Richard trained as a scientific editor, working at Current Opinion in Cell Biology and then Trends in Biochemical Sciences before being appointed Executive Editor of Journal of Cell Science at The Company of Biologists, where he played an important role developing and expanding the scientific scope of their program and transitioning the organization to online publishing. He joined Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2008 and became Assistance Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press in 2011. At Cold Spring Harbor, Richard launched as served as Editor for the journals Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology and Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Medicine. He has also edited several books, including the textbook Signal Transduction and Career Alternatives for Biomedical Scientists. Richard co-founded the preprint server bioRxiv at Cold Spring Harbor in 2013 with John Inglis to allow scientists to shared research much rapidly and co-founded medRxiv with colleagues from Yale and BMJ in 2019. The servers have become essential resources for biomedical researches and health professionals and played a critical role during the COVID-19 pandemic. Richard is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Morgridge Institute for Research, serves on the organizing committee for several National Academy workshops, and has been an invited speaker at numerous academic, industry, and government conferences. In 2022, he was awarded an honorary DSc from Cold Spring Harbor School of Biological Sciences in recognition of his work to promote scientific communcation.

John Inglis

Chair of the Scientific and Medical Advisory Board

John Inglis was awarded his PhD for research done in the laboratory of Professor James Irvine, a pioneer in the study of human autoimmunity at Edinburgh University Medical School. He was then appointed Assistant Editor of The Lancet medical journal in London. In 1980, he was invited to create and edit a new monthly review journal Immunology Today (now Trends in Immunology) in Cambridge, UK. He also contributed articles on biomedicine to The Guardian and The Times newspapers. In 1987, he was recruited to found Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press in New York, now a division of the Laboratory with over 40 staff. As Executive Directory and Published of the Press, John has launched nine journals and commissioned hundreds of books for scientists, students, and the general public. He also founded BiosupplyNet, an early online resource and directory enabling life scientists to find suppliers, manufacturers, and distributors of laboratory equipment, reagents, and other products.

In 2013, John and colleague Richard Sever founded bioRxiv, a service that enables scientists to make their research manuscripts (preprints) freely available online before formal publication. In 2019, with colleagues from Yale University Medical School and BMJ, they founded medRxiv, an equivalent service for health sciences. Since 2017, John has been Principal Investigator of sequential major grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative that have supported bioRxiv and medRxiv as they revolutionized how biomedical scientists communicate.

John is a former Board member and chair of the BIOSIS Indexing Service. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and serves on the Finance Committee of the American Society for Cell Biology and the Advisory Board of MIT Press. In 2022, he was made D.Sc. honoris causa by Cold Harbor Laboratory and elected as a fEllow of the American Society for Cell Biology.

Tracy K. Teal is a leader in open science, data science education, and community building within open-source ecosystems. She earned her Ph.D. in Computation and Neural Systems from the California Institute of Technology in 2007, where her research focused on the metabolic organization of bacterial biofilms. Following her doctorate, Teal served as a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Michigan State University in bioinformatics and microbial metagenomics. 

Recognizing the growing need for data literacy among researchers, Teal co-founded Data Carpentry, an organization dedicated to teaching fundamental data skills across various scientific domains. She later became the Executive Director of The Carpentries, a merger of Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry, where she led efforts to develop and disseminate data science curricula globally. Teal also held leadership roles as the Executive Director of Dryad, a nonprofit organization focused on making research data openly available. She served as the Open Source Program Director at Posit PBC (formerly RStudio) and then Nixtla, where she worked to support and sustain open-source communities.

In addition to her professional roles, Teal contributes to the broader scientific and open-source communities by serving on the boards and other advisory committees. Her work consistently emphasizes the importance of democratizing data and empowering individuals through education and open-source collaboration.

Scott Fraser

Board Chair

Professor Scott E. Fraser has a long-standing commitment to quantitative biology, applying the tools of chemistry, engineering, and physics to problems in fields ranging from developmental biology to medicine. His personal research centers on imaging and molecular analyses of intact biological systems, with an emphasis on early development, organogenesis, and medical diagnostics. His innovations have spawned several start-up companies, and have been integrated into instruments and FDA approved diagnostics.

After training in physics (B.S., Harvey Mudd College, 1976) and biophysics (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, 1979), Fraser served on the faculty at UC Irvine in the 80’s, rising to Chair of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics. In 1990 he moved to Caltech to serve as the Anna Rosen Professor, and founded several interdisciplinary centers. After moving to establish convergent bioscience at USC in 2012, Fraser moved in 2024 to become the Vice President of Science Grants for Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, one of the largest science philanthropies.

Fraser’s activity in interdisciplinary research and in translational science have been recognized by his election as a Fellow of the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Inventors, the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers, the American Academy of Arts and Science, and the European Academy of Science.

Edith Heard

Board Member

Professor Edith Heard obtained her PhD from the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (later Cancer Research UK), London. Therafter, she did her post doc at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, then was a one-year visiting scientist as Cold Spring Harbor in the USA. In 2001, she set up her own laboratory at the Institut Curie and in 2010 she became Director of the Institute’s Genetics  and Developmental Biology Unit. Edith was appointed as a Professor of the Collége de France in 2012, holding the Chair of Epigenetics and Cellular Memory. Since January 2019, Edith has been Director General of EMBL.

Edith’s laboratory focuses on understanding how chromatin and chromosome organisation participate in gene regulation in development and disease. Her group was among the first to show that the epigenetic process of X-chromosome inactivation (XCI), whereby one of a female’s two X chromosomes is silenced during development, is remarkably dynamic. Her lab has worked out many of the molecular mechanisms underlying X-chromosome inactivation and she uses this model to explore fundamental principles of gene regulation, chromatin and epigenetic processes in general. Edith’s group was one of the first to uncover the epigenetic dynamics of XCI during mammalian development and they have provided insights into the regulation and molecular action of the Xist non-coding RNA that triggers XCI.

Edith and her laboratory have been recognised by many prizes, most recently the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science International Award, Royal Society Croonian Medal (UK) and CNRS Gold Medal (France). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society, an EMBO Member, and a Foreign Associate member of the National Academy of Sciences (US), an International Member of the National Academy of Medicine (US), a Member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, a Corresponding Member of the Royal Academy in Denmark, an Elected Member f Académie des Sciences, Institut de France, and she has an Honorary Degree Doctor of Science Honoris causa at the University of Cambridge, an Honorary Professor Degree at the University of Heidelberg and an Honorary Doctor Degree at the University of Uppsala. Edith has participated in numerous scientific boards and is currently a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Crick Institute (London, UK), Institute Curie (Paris, France) and the WHO Science Council.

Jeff Huber

Board Member

Jeff is the Founding Chief Executive Officer and Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors of GRAIL. GRAIL’s mission is to detect cancer early, when it can be cured. Prior to Grail, Jeff worked at Google at the intersection of life science and computer science (2013-2016). Previously at Google, Jeff led development for Google Ads (2003-2011), Google Apps (2005-2010), and Google Maps (2011-2013). Earlier, Jeff was vice president of architecture and systems development at eBay and senior vice president of engineering at Excite@Home, where he led consumer product and infrastructure development. Jeff holds a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Illinois and a master’s degree from Harvard University. He is a board member of Electronic Arts (EA) and The Exploratorium, and former board member of Illumina (ILMN; 2014-2016).

Harlan Krumholz

Board Treasurer

Harlan Krumholz is a cardiologist and scientist at Yale University and Yale New Haven Hospital. He is the Harold H. Hines, Hr. Profess or of Medicine and the director of the Yale New Haven Hospital Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE), an organization dedicated to improving health and health care through research, tools, and practices that produce discovery, heighten accountability, and promote better public health and clinical care. He co-founded and co-leads the Yale University Open Data Access (YODA) Project, designed to increase access to clinical research data and promote their use to generate new knowledge. He also co-founded and co-leads medRxiv, a non-profit preprint server for the medical and health sciences. He was a founding faculty co-director of the Yale Center for Research Computing.

Dr. Krumholz has been honored by membership in the National Academy of Medicine, the Association of American Physicians, and the American Society for Clinical Investigation. He was named a Distinguished Scientist of the American Heart Association and received their Award of Meritorious Achievement and Clinical Research Prize. He served as a member of the Advisory Committee to the Director of the Nation Institutes of Health. Dr. Krumholz received the Friendship Award from the People’s Republic of China in recognition of his collaborative efforts to develop a national cardiovascular research network and was named by the Chinese Society of Cardiology as a Top-10 Distinguished International Cardiologist for his contributions to the developments of cardiovascular medicine in China. He founded the American Heart Association’s Quality of Care and Outcomes Research Council and co-founded their annual conference. He was the founding editor of Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes; founding editor of CardioExchange, a social media site of the published of the New England Journal of Medicine; and editor of Journal Watch Cardiology of the New England Journal of Medicine. He was a founding Governor of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. He is the Editor-in-Chief of JACC, a pre-eminent cardiovascular medical journal.

Bruce Stillman, AO, PhD, FAA, FRS

Board Secretary

Dr. Bruce Stillman was born in Melbourne, Australia and graduated Bachelor of Science with first class honors at the University of Sydney and Ph.D. at the John Curtin School of Medical Research within the Australian National University. He moved to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 1979 and has been at the Laboratory ever since and is currently the President and Oliver R. Grace Professor. Dr. Stillman was Director of the CSHL Cancer Center from 1992-2016. In 1994, he succeeded Nobel laureate James D. Watson as Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and was appointed President in 2003.

Dr. Stillman’s research focuses on the mechanism and regulation of duplication of DNA and chromatin in eukaryotic cells, a process that ensures that the genome is replicated completely and only once before cell division. He been elected to The Royal Society (UK), the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Australian Academy of Sciences.  He has received honors, including the Order of Australian (AO) in 1999 for his medical research,. Dr. Stillman has also received a number of awards and prizes, including the Alfred P. Sloan Prize from the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation (2004), the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University (2010), the Herbert Tabor Research Award from The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (2014), the Canada Gairdner International Award (2019) and the Heineken Prize in Biochemistry and Biophysics from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (2020) and the Earl and Thressa Stadtman Distinguished Scientist Award from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (2024). He has received seven honorary doctorates.

He is an advisor to universities, foundations, corporations, and government agencies. Dr. Stillman is a member of the Medical Advisory Board of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and advises several other research organizations, including the M.I.T. Cancer Center, the Biomedicine Discovery Institute at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and the University Of Pennsylvania Epigenetics Institute. He is a member of the jury for the Lasker Foundation Awards and is past chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), former vice-chair of the National Cancer Policy Board, and a former member of both the Board of Scientific Advisors of the NCI and the Board of Life Sciences of the US National Research Council.

Shirley Tilghman

Board Vice-Chair

Shirley M. Tilghman was elected Princeton University’s 19th president on May 5, 2001 after serving on the Princeton faculty for 15 years. Upon the completion of her term in June of 2013, she returned to the faculty. During her scientific career as a mammalian developmental geneticist, she studied the way in which genes are organized in the genome and regulated during early development, and was one of the founding members of the National Advisory Council of the Human Genome Project for the National Institutes of Health.

Tilghman is an Officer of the Order of Canada, the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Developmental Biology, the Genetics Society of America Medal, the L’Oreal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science, and the George W. Beadle Award from the Genetics Society of America. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Artis and Sciences and the Royal Society of London. She servers as a trustee of Amherst College, the Insitute of Advanced Sutdy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Simons Foundation. She is a director of The Broad Institute of MIT and the Hypothesis Fund, and a Fellow of the Corporation of Harvard College, and is an external science advisor for the Science Philanthropy Alliance.