Board of directors

Christian Doeller

Director

Professor Dr. Christian F. Doeller is Vice President of the Max Planck Society and Director of the Department of Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences.

Born in Würzburg, Germany; Studies in Psychology at University of Würzburg, Humboldt University Berlin & University of Bonn, Germany; Studies in Computer Science, Bonn; PhD in Psychology, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany (2005); Research Fellow, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, ICN & Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology, University College London, UCL, London, UK (2004); Senior Research Fellow, ICN & Institute of Neurology, UCL (2006); Associate Professor & Principal Investigator, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands (2010); Professor of Medicine (Neuroscience), Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway (2016); Director, The Egil and Pauline Braathen and Fred Kavli Centre for Cortical Microcircuits, Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, NTNU (2017); Director, Department of Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany (2018). Honorary Professor of Psychology (Learning & Memory), Leipzig University, Germany (2019). Managing Director, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany (2020-2023). Honorary Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience of Learning and Memory, Technical University (TU) Dresden, Germany. Vice President of the Max Planck Society (2023-).

Joanne Hackett

Chair

Joanne M. Hackett is the Head of Genomic and Precision Medicine at IQVIA and previously was the Chief Commercial Officer at Genomics England. She is a clinical academic, entrepreneur and investor, and a strategic, creative visionair with global experience spanning successful start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. Aside from her curious passion for life and positivity, Joanne is known for building innovation, driving personalised medicine and leading through fast-paced, complex changing ecosystems and integrations. Joanne’s goal is to contribute to bringing the world novel, cost-effective and simple healthcare solutions, and she is particularly keen on building the case for prevention, open science and citizen genomics. She has extensive global experience across academic, business and clinical institutions, and enjoys sharing her experiences with the boards she sits on as well as companies she provides strategic advice to. Joanne has been publicly recognised for her relentless pursuit of revolutionising healthcare and has been named one of the top six Influential Leaders in Healthcare by CIO Look, the Accenture Life Science Leader of the year, Freshfields Top 100 Most Influential Women, One HealthTech Top 70 Women in the NHS, Pharmaceutical Market Europe’s 30 women leaders in UK healthcare and BioBeat Top 50 Women in Biotech Award. Joanne believes in human courage and perseverance against the odds, and demonstrates that positive change, whether in a company or in one’s personal life, can be carved out from even the greatest of trials. As a believer of “health = wealth”, Joanne is an internationally known yoga instructor.

Kamran Naim

Director

Dr. Kamran Naim has more than 20 years of international leadership experience as an Open Science strategist. As Head of Open Science at CERN, Switzerland, the world’s largest research laboratory, he leads a diverse portfolio of activities which include the development of open science policies and their implementation and governance, while also managing the operations of flagship programs, including the world’s largest open access collaboration, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3). He also serves as a Director of the European Open Science Cloud Association (EOSC-A), a multi-national pan-European effort to establish dedicated scientific infrastructures to support the accelerated publishing, discovery, (re-)use, and application of open science tools and services. Prior to his time at CERN, Naim worked to pioneer equitable open-access models for academic publishing, co-developing the Subscribe to Open Model, now adopted by dozens of publishers worldwide. Throughout his career he has championed efforts to address global inequities in scientific information in partnership organisations including USAID, the US National Academies, and the World Bank, and continues to volunteer his time towards efforts to promote education and global health.

Dinesh Natesan

Director

Dinesh Natesan is an engineer-scientist, working in the field of neuroscience. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Barbara, California, US. He previously co-founded and ran a DeepTech optical computing startup.

He completed his joint PhD in Life Sciences and Computer Science from the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, India, and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. He completed his Bachelors in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and Masters in Biological Sciences from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India.

Natesan finds science extremely fun and is curious about various fields. To quench his curiosity, he tries to read widely and note what he finds interesting. He also enjoys nifty innovations and tries to build things himself (he perhaps oversubscribes to the DIY lifestyle). He writes about the topics he finds interesting on his website, https://dineshnatesan.com. He thrives on feedback (positive or negative) and encourages anyone who has thoughts about his content, or who just wants to chat, to reach out to him.

Dan O'Connor

Director

Dan O'Connor is the Head of Research Environment at Wellcome and until 2019 was the Head of Humanities and Social Science. He has a PhD in the History of Medicine and was previously on the faculty at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. He has published articles on the ethical challenges of using social media in healthcare, on the ethics of human enhancement, and on the history and politics of bioethics.

The Research Environment team works to ensure that all of the research that Wellcome funds is open, engaged, ethical, efficient and equitable. The team leads Wellcome's activities in research culture, open research and open access, bioethics, the social and cultural impact of research, researcher-led engagement, and connecting Wellcome's community of researchers.

Erin O'Shea

Director

Erin O’Shea is president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Paul C. Mangelsdorf Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. O’Shea was named an HHMI investigator in 2000, became HHMI’s chief scientific officer in 2013, and became the institute’s president in 2016. Prior to joining HHMI’s leadership team, she spent eight years at Harvard, where she directed the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Center for Systems Biology. O’Shea also served on the faculty of the UC-San Francisco. She earned a PhD in chemistry from MIT and a bachelor's degree in biochemistry from Smith College.

O’Shea is known as a leader in the fields of gene regulation, signal transduction, and systems biology. She is currently developing a lab at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has won numerous awards.

Freddie Quek

Director

Freddie Quek is Chief Technology Officer at Times Higher Education. He has worked in Singapore, the US and UK across many industry sectors. He started his career in publishing and has worked for Current Science Group, Elsevier and Wiley, helping to transform the industry to digital in pioneering the use of NoSQL technologies and achieving large-scale agile implementations. His portfolio of digital product platforms included the Lancet, Elsevier Health Science and Wiley Online Library.

He is recognised as one of the UK’s top IT leaders by CIO100 and Computing. In 2021, he started the #joiningthedots initiative to address #digitalinclusion, becoming a Community Board member of the Digital Poverty Alliance and Chair of the BCS Digital Divide Specialist Group. He serves on the boards at the University of Bristol, UK, and BCS Influence Board, and is a member of the Technology Advisory Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He co-founded TechLinkUkraine to help displaced Ukrainian tech professionals, which has now joined forces with BlueHope.ai in supporting all displaced refugees regardless of conflict or country.

Freddie is a Fellow of BCS and a judge for the UK IT Industry Awards. He has Masters degrees from the London School of Economics, UK, and Henley Business School, UK, and is an alumnus of Oxford University, UK. Currently he is a Research Associate at Henley Business School undertaking doctoral research, and a member of the London Multimedia Lab led by Professor P. Humphreys, London School of Economics.

K VijayRaghavan

Director

Krishnaswamy VijayRaghavan is the DAE Homi Bhabha Chair Professor and former director of the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore, India. From April 2018–April 2022, he served as the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India. Prior to that, from 2013–2018, he was Secretary to the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India. Until recently, he was a Senior Editor at eLife.

VijayRaghavan’s research interests are in the fields of developmental biology, genetics and neurogenetics, on the principles and mechanisms that control the nervous system and muscles during development, and how these neuromuscular systems direct specific locomotor behaviours.

In addition to continuing his laboratory’s research interests, Dr. VijayRaghavan is currently involved in studying how sustainable development can be enabled in the context of climate change and the energy crisis. In this context, his focus is on how the university system in India can be empowered to this task, and how industry collaboration in research can be enhanced.

Dr. VijayRaghavan is a Fellow of the Indian Science Academies. In 2012, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and was conferred the Padma Shri in 2013 by the Government of India. He is a foreign member of the US National Academy of Sciences, of EMBO, and a member of the American Philosophical Society. For more information, see https://www.ncbs.res.in/faculty/vijay and https://www.ncbs.res.in/faculty/vijay-publications.

Fiona Watt

Director

Fiona Watt obtained her first degree from the University of Cambridge, UK, and her DPhil, in cell biology, from the University of Oxford, UK. She was a postdoc at MIT, Massachusetts, US, where she first began studying differentiation and tissue organisation in mammalian epidermis. She established her first research group at the Kennedy Institute for Rheumatology in London, UK, and then spent 20 years at the CRUK London Research Institute. She helped to establish the CRUK Cambridge Research Institute and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Stem Cell Research and in 2012 she moved to King's College London to found the Centre for Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine. From 2018–2022, Watt was on secondment as Executive Chair of the Medical Research Council. In 2022 she moved to Heidelberg, Germany, where she runs a lab at EMBL and is EMBO Director. Amongst her numerous awards and honours, Watt is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, an EMBO member and an international member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Huda Zoghbi

Director

Huda Zoghbi is Distinguished Service Professor of Pediatrics, Neurology, Molecular and Human Genetics, and Neuroscience, at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, US. She is also an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Director of the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children’s Hospital. Her research focuses on understanding normal brain development and on elucidating the pathogenesis of several neurological disorders including autism spectrum disorder, Rett syndrome, and late-onset neurodegenerative diseases.