John Wilbanks
Former CSO Syneos Health
John Wilbanks is a researcher, entrepreneur, and advocate whose career has spanned nonprofit, academic, and commercial sectors, all focused on making scientific and healthcare data more accessible and useful. Early in his career he founded and led to acquisition Incellico, a knowledge graph company serving the pharmaceutical industry, before serving as Executive Director of Science Commons, where he pioneered legal and technical frameworks for sharing research data. Later he helped spin Sage Bionetworks out of Merck, where he advanced portable legal consent models and governance frameworks for large-scale biomedical data sharing.
Wilbanks later moved into industry leadership at Biogen, where he led data for Biogen Digital Health, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he led product for Terra, the largest cloud-based platform for genomic analysis. Throughout his career, he has argued that traditional approaches to consent, intellectual property, and data governance often slow scientific progress, and has advocated for networked approaches that balance accelerating scientific insights with appropriate protections for human beings.