Gary Ward
PLoS Chairman of the Board; Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics and Co-Director of the Vermont Center for Immunology and Infectious Diseases, University of Vermont
Gary Ward received his PhD in 1985 from UC San Diego under the direction of Victor Vacquier and did his postdoctoral training at UC San Francisco with Marc Kirschner, studying cell cycle regulation. He was a Senior Staff Fellow at the NIH’s Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases from 1989 to 1996, where he worked on malaria with Lou Miller. Ward joined the faculty at the University of Vermont in 1996 and was named a Burroughs Wellcome New Investigator in Molecular Parasitology. He is currently Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics and co-Director of the Vermont Center for Immunology and Infectious Disease. His lab studies the cellular and molecular biology of protozoan parasites. Ward was Treasurer and Member of the Executive Committee of the American Society for Cell Biology from 2002 to 2008 and a charter member of the PLoS Biology Editorial Board. He was a member of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) Public Access Working Group, has been Chair of NLM’s PubMed Central National Advisory Committee, and is currently a member of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) Open Access working group.
Patrick O. Brown
PLoS Co-founder; Stanford University School of Medicine, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Patrick O. Brown was born in Washington, DC, in 1954, and grew up in Northern Virginia; Paris, France; and Taipei, Taiwan. In 1972, he entered the University of Chicago, finally emerging nearly a decade later with a BA, MD, and PhD. His thesis work, with Nick Cozzarelli, investigated the basic molecular mechanisms of DNA topoisomerases. Brown completed residency training in pediatrics in 1985, at Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital. In a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, with J. Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus, he characterized the mechanism by which retroviruses such as HIV incorporate their genes into the genomes of their hosts. In 1988, he joined the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Stanford University School of Medicine, where he is currently a professor in the department of biochemistry. His current research activities include systematic studies of global gene expression programs and their regulation; the use of DNA microarrays and other “genomic” approaches to explore fundamental questions in cell biology, physiology, and development; and the development and application of new high-dimensional molecular profiling methods for detection and diagnosis of disease. Brown is married to Sue Klapholz, MD, PhD, with three children: Zach, Ariel, and Isaac.
Michael B. Eisen
PLoS Co-founder; Assistant Professor of Genetics, Genomics and Development, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley
Michael B. Eisen is a computational and evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Berkeley and the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and an ardent advocate for the free flow of scientific methods, data, and knowledge. He received his undergraduate degree in mathematics (with extensive side studies in ecology and evolutionary biology) from Harvard College in 1989. He received a PhD in biophysics from Harvard University in 1996 for his doctoral research on influenza virus proteins structure and function. After a summer working as a play-by-play announcer for the Columbia Mules (a minor league baseball team in Columbia, Tennessee), he joined the laboratories of Patrick O. Brown and David Botstein at Stanford as a postdoctoral fellow. While at Stanford, Eisen developed methods and software for the analysis of data from genome-wide expression studies. In 2000, he moved to Berkeley, where he runs his own lab studying how regulatory information is encoded in genome sequences and the role that variation in regulatory sequences has played in evolution. He is a 2001 Pew Biomedical Scholar and received a 2004 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.
David Liddle
Venture Partner, US Venture Partners
David Liddle joined US Venture Partners in January 2000, after retiring as president and CEO of business incubator Interval Research Corporation. Prior to co-founding Interval with Paul Allen, David founded and served as CEO of Metaphor, which was acquired by IBM in 1991, where he became Vice President of Business Development for IBM Personal Systems. David’s extensive experience in research and development includes 10 years at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), from 1972 to 1982. He has been a director of Sybase, Broderbund Software, Borland International and Ticketmaster, and is currently on the board of the New York Times Company, and MaxLinear. His board involvement at USVP includes Electric Cloud, Instantis, Karmasphere, Klocwork, and Optichron. David has served on the DARPA Information Science and Technology Committee, and as chair of the NAS Computer Science and Telecommunications board. David earned a BS in Electrical Engineering at the University of Michigan and an MSEE, MSES, and PhD at the University of Toledo, where his dissertation focused on reconfigurable computing machines. His contributions to human-computer interaction design earned him the distinction of Senior Fellow at the Royal College of Art. He has served as a Consulting Professor of EE and also of CS at Stanford. He is on the boards of the Colleges of Engineering at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and the University of Toledo, and once chaired the board of the Santa Fe Institute, an organization that promotes the sciences.
Rosalind L. Smyth
Brough Professor of Paediatric Medicine and Head of the Division of Child Health at University of Liverpool
Rosalind Smyth is Brough Professor of Paediatric Medicine and Head of the Division of Child Health at University of Liverpool. A native of Northern Ireland, she graduated in medicine from Clare College Cambridge and University of London and trained in pediatrics in London, Cambridge, and Liverpool. Her research thesis at the University of Cambridge investigated host response to infections in heart-lung transplant patients. Her current research interests include clinical studies of viral/host interactions in RSV bronchiolitis, clinical trials, and systematic reviews of treatments for childhood respiratory disease. She chairs the UK’s Commission on Human Medicine’s Paediatric Expert Advisory Group and is Director of the UK Medicines for Children Research Network. She is married to Andrew Bowhay, a pediatric anesthetist, and they have two teenage children, Thomas and Riona.
Marty Tenenbaum
Chairman and Founder of CommerceNet
Jay M. (“Marty”) Tenenbaum, Chairman and Founder of CommerceNet, is a world-renowned Internet commerce pioneer and visionary. He was founder and CEO of Enterprise Integration Technologies, the first company to conduct a commercial Internet transaction (1992), secure Web transaction (1993), and Internet auction (1993). In 1994, he founded CommerceNet to accelerate business use of the Internet. In 1997, he co-founded Veo Systems, the company that pioneered the use of XML for automating business-to-business transactions. Dr. Tenenbaum joined Commerce One in January 1999, when it acquired Veo Systems. As Chief Scientist, he was instrumental in shaping the company’s business and technology strategies for the Global Trading Web. Post Commerce One, he was an officer and director of Webify Solutions (sold to IBM in 2006) and Medstory (sold to Microsoft in 2007). He’s currently focused on transforming healthcare and accelerating therapy development through collaborative e-science. Earlier in his career, Dr. Tenenbaum was a prominent AI researcher, and led AI research groups at SRI International and Schlumberger Ltd. Dr. Tenenbaum is a Fellow and former board member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and a former Consulting Professor of Computer Science at Stanford. He currently serves as a director of Efficient Finance and Patients Like Me, and is a Consulting Professor of Information Technology at Carnegie Mellon’s new West Coast campus. Dr. Tenenbaum holds BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and a PhD from Stanford.
Beth Weil
Head librarian, Marian Koshland Bioscience and Natural Resources Library, University of California, Berkeley
Beth Weil is the Head Librarian of the Marian Koshland Bioscience and Natural Resources Library at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her undergraduate degree in Zoology from the University of California, Davis in Zoology and her MLS from the University of California, Berkeley. She began her librarian career in the National Library of Medicine’s postgraduate Associate Fellowship program and continued to work at NLM for several years before moving to manage Stanford University’s Falconer Biology Library. In 1986 Beth moved to Berkeley, where she merged the collections of five life science libraries into a renovated space at the cutting edge of science libraries worldwide. Beth has served on several journal advisory boards and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Library Advisory Board, on which she has served since 1998. In 2003 she was honored with the Librarian’s Association of the University of California, Berkeley Division Distinguished Librarian Award.
