John Wilbanks

Biography

John Wilbanks is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at ICSI and a researcher, entrepreneur, and advocate whose career has focused on improving the accessibility, usability, and governance of scientific and healthcare data across nonprofit, academic, and commercial environments. His work sits at the intersection of open science, biomedical data sharing, digital health, and artificial intelligence, with an emphasis on building technical and legal frameworks that enable responsible large-scale collaboration.

Early in his career, Wilbanks founded and led Incellico, a knowledge-graph company serving the pharmaceutical industry that was later acquired. He later served as Executive Director of Science Commons, where he helped develop legal and technical frameworks that made it easier for researchers to share, reuse, and build upon scientific data.

Wilbanks subsequently helped spin Sage Bionetworks out of Merck, where he worked on governance models and portable legal consent frameworks for large-scale biomedical data sharing. These approaches helped enable new forms of collaborative research and were adopted by organizations including Apple and the National Institutes of Health.

He later moved into industry and research leadership roles, including leading data initiatives for Biogen Digital Health, serving as product lead for the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard’s Terra cloud-based platform for genomic analysis, and working at the Astera Institute on the development of AI-ready scientific data products.

Across his career, Wilbanks has focused on building systems that allow researchers, clinicians, and organizations to work with complex data in ways that are both technically powerful and ethically responsible. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Tulane University.

Publications

Areas of Expertise

• Knowledge Representation and Automated Reasoning
• AI Ethics, Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
• AI in Healthcare, Biomedicine, and Life Sciences
• Computer Networks, Internet Protocols, and Web Infrastructure
• Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design
• User Experience (UX), Usability, and Interface Design
• AI Ethics, Responsible AI, and Governance of Technology
• Technology Policy, Standards, and Global Governance
• Open Data, FAIR Data Principles, and Research Transparency
• Open Access Publishing, Preprints, and Knowledge Repositories
• Open Licensing, Governance, and Sustainability of Projects
• Interoperability, Standards, and Data Sharing Frameworks

ICSI Activity