John Wilbanks works at the intersection of data, software, policy, and science. He is currently Head of Product for the Data Sciences Platform at the Broad Institute, which serves 65,000+ data scientists on more than 80PB of biomedical data. He also serves as Senior Advisor to the Milken Institute’s FasterCures, and as Senior Fellow at the Datasphere Initiative.
He was most recently Head of Data at Biogen Digital Health, where he led teams running real-world digital studies, building data products, and implementing data science software platforms. Before Biogen, he was Chief Commons Officer at Sage Bionetworks, where he led efforts in governance and informed consent. Sage’s informed consent toolkit has been integrated into Apple’s ResearchKit, Android ResearchStack, and has supported the enrollment of hundreds of thousands of participants in mobile studies since its open source release in 2016.
John’s technical background includes a stint in web standards at the World Wide Web Consortium, as the Founder and CEO of a venture-backed graph bioinformatics company, and in voice/pen human-computer interface. His policy background includes leading open science at Creative Commons (when he was also a visiting scientist at the MIT Project on Mathematics and Computation), serving on the national advisory board for the US National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central, and as a Legislative Assistant in the US House of Representatives.
John holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Tulane University in New Orleans.
