Ryan Merkley is CEO of Conscience, an emerging biotech non-profit, using AI and collaborative science to address areas of market failure in drug development. He is also the Senior Technology Fellow at the Aspen Institute, working across a variety of topics, including AI, open source, intellectual property, data and privacy, and information integrity. He is an affiliate of the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and the founding chair of the Flickr Foundation.
He recently served as Managing Director for Aspen Digital, a program of the Aspen Institute, and was Director of its Commission on Information Disorder. Prior to joining the Aspen Institute, Ryan spent over a decade as a c-suite executive in technology non-profits, including Chief of Staff at the Wikimedia Foundation, five years as CEO at Creative Commons, and Chief Operating Officer at Mozilla. He served as Director of Corporate Communications for the City of Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Games, and was a Senior Advisor to Mayor David Miller in Toronto, where he led the Mayor’s budget policy and initiated Toronto’s Open Data project.
