Board of directors

Prachee Avasthi

Chair

Prachee Avasthi is a co-founder and incoming Chief Scientific Officer of Arcadia Science, which she joined from her role as an associate professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College. An advocate for preprints and open science, Prachee was the first early career researcher to be appointed to the board of directors of eLife and also serves on the board of directors of ASAPbio as its president. She advises various organizations that support the biomedical workforce and founded the online peer-mentoring community, New PI Slack, for junior faculty.

Prachee received her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Utah and completed her postdoctoral studies at the University of California in San Francisco. She started her independent research program at the University of Kansas Medical Center using unicellular green algae to study the assembly and regulation of cytoskeletal machines before moving her laboratory to Dartmouth.

Joanne Hackett

Director

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.

Ulman Lindenberger

Director

Ulman Lindenberger is Vice President of the Human Sciences Section of the Max Planck Society and Director of the Center for Lifespan Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. Together with Ray Dolan, he also directs the Max Planck University College London Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, located in London and Berlin. Ulman Lindenberger studied psychology and biology in Berlin and Berkeley. He completed his doctoral degree and habilitation in psychology at the Freie Universität Berlin, and then held a professorship at Saarland University. Currently, he holds honorary professorships with the Freie Universität Berlin, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Saarland University.

His research interests include behavioral and neural aspects of plasticity across the lifespan, age changes in brain-behavior relations, lifespan developmental theory, and multivariate developmental methodology. He is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize 2010 of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

Photo copyright: David Ausserhofer

Jane McKeating

Director

Jane McKeating is the Professor of Molecular Virology at the Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, UK, and a founding fellow of Reuben College, Oxford. She directs the viral hypoxia and circadian biology research group. Jane studied virology at the University of Warwick, UK, and University College London, UK. On completing her postgraduate studies, she worked at the Institute of Cancer Research, UK, the University of Reading, UK, the Rockefeller University, New York, US, and University of Birmingham, UK, before setting up her current research group in Oxford. Jane has received many awards for her work and holds an honorary professorship at the Technische Universität München, Germany. Her research interests focus on the biology of hepatotropic viruses and the influence of hypoxia on their replication; the impact of hypoxia on respiratory viral infections; and the role of the circadian clock in viral infections and host immune responses.

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.

Federico (Fede) Pelisch

Director

Federico (Fede) Pelisch is a Principal Investigator at the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee, Scotland, UK. An advocate for preprints and open science, Fede has been part of the PreLights community, acted as a bioRxiv affiliate, and was part of the eLife Board of Reviewing Editors for one year. Fede received his PhD in Biological Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and performed most of his postdoctoral studies at the University of Dundee. He started his independent research program at the University of Dundee as a Medical Research Council Career Development Fellow, using the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as a model to study the regulation of chromosome segregation in oocytes.

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.