John Wilbanks works at the intersection of data, software, policy, and science. He is currently the Head of Data for the Astera Institute. Additionally, he serves as a senior advisor to the Milken Institute’s FasterCures and as a senior fellow at the Datasphere Initiative. Previously, he led software product at the Broad Institute’s Data Science Platform, supporting more than 65,000 users on 100PB of data. He also was Head of Data at Biogen Digital Health, where he led teams in conducting real-world digital studies, developing data products, and implementing data science software platforms. Before Biogen, he served as the Chief Commons Officer at Sage Bionetworks, where he led efforts in unlocking informed consent for mobile-centered clinical studies adopted by Apple, Android, the US National Institutes of Health, and more.
Wilbanks’ technical background includes various roles such as working in technology standards at the World Wide Web Consortium, serving as a visiting scientist at the MIT Project on Mathematics and Computation, and serving as founding CEO of an early knowledge graph bioinformatics company, His policy background includes advocating for open science at Creative Commons and serving on the national advisory board for PubMed Central.
