PLoS Board of Directors
Harold E. Varmus, PLoS Co-founder and Chairman of the Board
President & Chief Executive,
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
Patrick O. Brown, PLoS Co-founder
Stanford University School of Medicine
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Michael B. Eisen, PLoS Co-founder
Assistant Professor of Genetics, Genomics and Development, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology
University of California, Berkeley
James D. A. Boyle
William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law
Duke Law School
Don Listwin
Founder, Canary Foundation
Elizabeth Marincola
President, Society for Science & the Public
Publisher, Science News
Richard Smith
Chief Executive European arm of UnitedHealth Group
Visiting Professor, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Former Chief Executive & Editor of BMJ
Rosalind L. Smyth
Brough Professor of Paediatric Medicine and Head of the Division of Child Health at University of Liverpool
Marty Tenenbaum
Chairman and Founder of CommerceNet
Tom Unterman
Managing Partner, Rustic Canyon Partners
Beth Weil
Head of the Marian Koshland Bioscience and Natural Resources Library
University of California at Berkeley
Harold E. Varmus
Harold Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and co-recipient of a Nobel prize for studies of the genetic basis of cancer, currently serves as the president and chief executive officer of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. A native of Freeport, Long Island, Varmus majored in English literature at Amherst College and earned a master's degree in English at Harvard University. A graduate of Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, he worked as a medical student in a hospital in India and served on the medical house staff at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. His scientific training occurred first as a Public Health Service officer at the NIH, where he studied bacterial gene expression with Ira Pastan, and then as a post-doctoral fellow with J. Michael Bishop at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Much of his scientific work was conducted during 23 years as a faculty member at UCSF, where he, Bishop, and their co-workers demonstrated the cellular origins of the oncogene of a chicken retrovirus. For this work, Bishop and Varmus received the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In 1993, Varmus was named by President Bill Clinton to serve as the director of the NIH, a position he held until his appointment as CEO of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Varmus is married to Constance Casey, a journalist and horticulturist; their two sons, Jacob and Christopher, also live in New York City.
Patrick O. Brown
Patrick O. Brown was born in Washington, D.C., 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 B.A., M.D., and Ph.D. 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 post-doctoral 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, M.D., Ph.D., with three children: Zach, Ariel, and Isaac.
Michael B. Eisen
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 Ph.D. 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.
James D. A. Boyle
James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School and cofounder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain. He is the author of Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society and writes widely on issues of intellectual property, Internet regulation, and legal theory. He is the Chairman of the Board of Creative Commons, which is working to facilitate the free availability of art, scholarship, and cultural materials by developing innovative, machine-readable licenses that individuals and institutions can attach to their work. Professor Boyle is also a cofounder of Science Commons, which aims to expand the Creative Commons mission into the realm of scientific and technical data, and of ccLearn, which works to promote the development and use of open educational resources. He serves on the academic advisory boards of the Electronic Privacy and Information Center, the Connexions open-source courseware project, and of Public Knowledge. In 2003 Professor Boyle won the World Technology Network Award for Law for his work on the public domain and the "second enclosure movement" that threatens it. He writes a regular online column for the Financial Times' New Economy Policy Forum. His recent books include Bound By Law, a coauthored "graphic novel" about the effects of intellectual property on documentary film; The Shakespeare Chronicles, a novel; and The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, which will be published by Yale University Press in Fall of 2008.
Don Listwin
Don Listwin is a distinguished networking veteran with more than 25 years of industry experience. During the past two decades, he has served in senior executive roles at Cisco Systems and Openwave Systems. Listwin is Founder and Chairman of Canary Foundation, a public non-profit organization focused on advocating and funding the development of a Biomarker Discovery Platform (BDP) to provide for the early detection of cancer. The Canary Foundation is dedicated to the advancement of molecular diagnostics and applying the Internet collaboration model to the development of the BDP. Listwin serves on the Board of Directors of Sana Security, Calix Networks, GenoLogics, and the Listwin Family Foundation. Don is also a member of the Board of Trustees at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle Washington. A native of Canada, Listwin holds a B.S. in electrical engineering and an honorary doctorate of law from the University of Saskatchewan.
Elizabeth Marincola
Elizabeth Marincola is President of the nonprofit Society for Science & the Public and publisher of Science News, an award-winning weekly magazine. Science Service owns and manages the Science Talent Search (formerly known as the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, and, since 1998, the Intel Science Talent Search), the Intel International Science & Engineering Fair and the Discovery Channel Young Scientist Challenge. Marincola was for fourteen years Executive Director of the American Society for Cell Biology, a leading scientific society in Congressional advocacy for biomedical research funding, promoting access to the scientific literature, and the support of women and underrepresented minorities in science. For its work, Marincola accepted the 2004 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring from the President of the United States. The ASCB honored her service in 2002 by naming her, with the late actor-advocate Christopher Reeve, the first Citizen Member of the Society. Marincola served on the founding National Advisory Committee to PubMed Central of the National Institutes of Health from 2000-2003, and she currently serves on the Board of Directors or the Public Library of Science and the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University. She is the only nonscientist to be named the Fae Golden Kass Lecturer at Harvard Medical School. Before moving to Washington, Marincola was Director of Development for Stanford University Hospital and held other administrative posts at Stanford, where she also earned her bachelor's degree in 1981 and her MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1986. Marincola is married to Francesco (Franco) Marincola, MD, a surgeon and immunologist who is director of the immunogenetics laboratory in the department of transfusion medicine in the clinical center of the National Institutes of Health. They have three children: James, Paula and Rachel.
Richard Smith
Richard has been a central figure in the world of scientific and medical publishing. He has championed the causes of increased access to research articles, particularly in the developing world, improved ethical standards for researchers and authors, and most recently, open access publishing models. Dr. Smith is working with the the National Health Service and other European health services. Education: Edinburgh (MD) and Stanford University Business School (MS Management) and worked in hospital medicine in New Zealand and Scotland before joining the BMJ. In recent years, Dr. Smith, while running a for-profit commercial publishing business, has encouraged the development of new business models that would maintain publishing revenues while offering free access to full-text versions of original research.
Rosalind L. Smyth
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 paediatrics 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 paediatric anaesthetist, and they have two teenage children, Thomas and Riona.
Marty Tenenbaum
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 B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and a Ph.D. from Stanford.
Tom Unterman
Tom Unterman is currently a managing partner at Rustic Canyon Partners, an investment firm that he founded in 1999. A graduate of Princeton University and the University of Chicago Law School, Tom has worked at law firms in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and was an executive at The Times Mirror Company before starting Rustic Canyon. Tom currently serves on the Boards of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Heal the Bay, Pacific Community Ventures, PLoS, as well as several of Rustic Canyon's portfolio companies, Loopnet (NASDAQ: LOOP), Practice Technologies; Mediaspan, ODS-Petrodata and Meximerica.
Beth Weil
Beth Weil is the Head Librarian of the Marian Koshland Bioscience and Natural Resources Library at the Unversity of California, Berkeley. She received her undergraduate degree in Zoology from the University of California, Davis in Zoology and her M.L.S. 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 including a being 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.
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