John Wilbanks

John Wilbanks is the Chief Commons Officer at Sage Bionetworks. He also serves as a Senior Fellow in Entrepreneurship at Faster Cures. Previously, Wilbanks worked as a legislative aide to Congressman Fortney "Pete" Stark, was the first assistant director at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, founded and led to acquisition the bioinformatics company Incellico, Inc., which merged into Selventa in 2003, and was the executive director of the Science Commons project at Creative Commons. Wilbanks founded Consent to Research and co-founded the Access to Research campaign, significantly enhancing access to federally funded scientific research results.

In February 2013, in response to a "We the People" petition that was spearheaded by Wilbanks and signed by 65,000 people, the U.S. government announced a plan to open up taxpayer-funded research data and make it available for free. Wilbanks' commitment to open access and data sharing in research is further evidenced by his role in launching multiple initiatives and his contributions to numerous publications on data sharing. He authored a chapter titled "I Have Seen the Paradigm Shift, And It Is Us" in "The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery" published by Microsoft Research in 2009.

Wilbanks serves on the board of directors for Impact Story and the tranSMART Foundation, and is on the advisory boards for Boundless Learning, Curious, GenoSpace, and Patients Like Me. His previous affiliations include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Project on Mathematics and Computation. He holds a BA in philosophy from Tulane University and studied modern letters at the Sorbonne. Wilbanks has further shared his insights and experiences in a featured TED Talk, highlighting his thought leadership in the field of data-driven science.