The Rapid Science mission is to accelerate the pace and accuracy of scientific discovery through open and collaborative practices

Board of Directors

Sarah Greene, MSc
President & CEO

Sarah founded Rapid Science in 2014. She is a biologist, scientific publisher, entrepreneur, and early advocate of open science. Most recently, as President & CEO of RS, she co-founded the strategic initiative Incentivizing Collaborative and Open Science (ICOR), with Kristen Ratan at Strategies for Open Science (Stratos). ICOR is dedicated to formulating and implementing practical ideas that will engender a research culture grounded in openness and trust. Its origin is based on earlier work with the funding initiative Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP), whose pioneering open policies and practices have set new standards in the biomedical funding arena. In this capacity, she served on the Experts Group of cOAlition S, an alliance of research funders committed to making research publications fully and immediately Open Access.

Prior to founding Rapid Science, Sarah served as Executive Director of the nonprofit Cancer Commons, creating collaborative research methodologies on two large multi-site, interdisciplinary research initiatives. Sarah was previously editor of The Scientist magazine and served as editorial director of Faculty of 1000 when the transformative journal F1000 Research was created—the first open access journal to accept preprints and conduct fully transparent peer review and author revisions.

In her career as an entrepreneur, Sarah founded the continually updated and best-selling series Current Protocols, the evidence-based, updatable Best Practice of Medicine, and the web magazines HMS Beagle and Praxis Post, which covered the intersections of culture and biology/medicine. These initiatives were sold, respectively, to John Wiley & Sons, Thomson Healthcare, and Elsevier. She also co-founded the open access Journal of Participatory Medicine (and its society) and developed innovative products at The New York Times (the Health vertical) and the New York Academy of Sciences.

Kristen Ratan, MSc
Executive Director & Secretary

Kristen co-founded ICOR with Sarah Greene in 2020, and joined the Rapid Science Board in 2021.  She is the founder of Stratos (Strategies for Open Science), an organization that works with partnering organizations, institutions, and funders to achieve open science goals, offering a combination of strategic planning, policy guidance, and implementation of practice and infrastructure. Kristen has a 25-year history working to accelerate advances in science and research communication. She co-founded the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation (Coko), was the Publisher at the Public Library of Science (PLOS), and also held leadership positions at HighWire Press, Atypon, and BIOSIS. Kristen is on the board of the American Institute of Physics Publishing, the Code for Science and Society, and ASAPbio and serves on the advisory board of several open source and open science projects and initiatives.

Bruce Alberts, PhD, Chair

Bruce is Professor Emeritus of Biophysics and Biochemistry at UCSF School of Medicine where his notable research includes the elucidation of protein complexes that enable chromosome replication when living cells divide. He was an original (and continuing) author of Molecular Biology of the Cell, is the past President of the American Society of Cell Biology, and served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Science. Bruce was one of the first three Science Envoys of the U.S., and has been committed in his international work to the promotion of the “creativity, openness and tolerance that are inherent to science.” As President of the National Academy of Sciences from 1993 to 2005, he was instrumental in developing the landmark National Science Education standards that have been implemented in school systems nationwide. Bruce has earned many honors and awards, including 14 honorary degrees, is an Overseer at Harvard University and is a trustee of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in Palo Alto, California.

David D. Moore, PhD, Treasurer

David is a molecular biologist who has made seminal discoveries in the roles of nuclear hormone receptors in health and disease, including research that links disruption in circadian rhythm to liver cancer in mice. He began his post-doctoral career as a founding faculty member in the newly formed Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He also joined the Genetics Department at Harvard Medical School, and while there, began his career-spanning work as a founding editor of the Current Protocols series published by John Wiley & Sons. In 1997 he moved from Boston to Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where he served as Professor and is now Distinguished Emeritus in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. In 2020 David joined UC Berkeley as Professor of Nutritional Sciences & Toxicology, a department that focuses on the metabolic biology of nutrients and toxicants in relation to human health and disease. He is an associate editor of the journal Endocrinology and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Keith R. Yamamoto, PhD, Director

Keith is the vice chancellor for science policy and strategy, director of precision medicine, and professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology at UCSF.  After earning his PhD from Princeton University, Yamamoto joined the UCSF faculty. His research has focused on signaling and transcriptional regulation by nuclear receptors; he uses mechanistic and systems approaches to pursue these problems in pure molecules, cells and whole organisms.  He has led or served on numerous national committees focused on public and scientific policy, public understanding and support of biological research, and science education. He chairs the Coalition for the Life Sciences, co-chairs the Science and Technology Action Committee and the National Academies Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science, is vice chair of the Advisory Council of the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine, and sits on the Board of Directors and Executive Committee of Research!America, the Board of Directors and Scientific Advisory Committee of the Public Library of Science, the Governing Board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the Board of Counselors for the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, and the Advisory Board for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  He founded the journal Molecular Biology of the Cell and served as its editor-in-chief. He has chaired or served on many committees that oversee training and the biomedical workforce, research funding, and the process of peer review and the policies that govern it at NIH. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Microbiology, and in 2022 was named president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Expert Collaborators

Ash Ayman Shairzay

Ash is a user experience design consultant and the design co-founder of CeeTOC, a collaboration platform that helps clinicians with difficult cases and develops treatment plans outside the standard of care. Over the years he has worked on several products for researchers, including the Center for Open Science, Cancer Commons, Faculty of 1000 and The Scientist magazine, consulting closely with entrepreneurs and innovators to help shape their vision. As a UX designer, he specializes in solving design challenges presented by complex and content-rich products, and as a trained philosopher, he strives to design products that are “humanity-centered” to be morally responsible of our well-being.

Emma Shtivelman, PhD

Emma is a molecular and cell biologist with extensive experience in cancer biology. She has in-depth understanding of cancer signal transduction and metabolism, cancer models in vitro and in vivo, target and drug discovery and validation, assay development, and preclinical research. She has technical expertise in numerous modern methodologies employed to understand the molecular basis of human malignancies and advance preclinical and clinical research.  Emma received her PhD in molecular biology from the Weizmann Institute of Science where she identified the fused transcript between two cellular genes, BCR and ABL in chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), the first demonstration of an oncogenic gene product derived from a chromosomal translocation. As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), she characterized the molecular consequences of chromosomal translocations in Burkitt lymphoma and identified gene products relevant to the pathogenesis of neuroblastoma.  She worked at Systemix on establishing a novel SCID-hu metastasis model to enable the in vivo analysis of human tumor metastasis. She continued her research activity at the UCSF Cancer Center analyzing deregulation of signal transduction pathways in human cancer and the molecular underpinnings of metastatic progression. Before joining Cancer Commons, Emma worked at BioNovo, Inc., researching new drugs that selectively disrupt metabolism of breast and pancreatic cancers by targeting their metabolic preferences.

Evelyn Strauss, PhD

Evelyn is a biologist-turned-journalist who has extensive experience launching and running innovative websites for researchers. She earned a PhD in biochemistry at the University of California, San Francisco, and studied bacterial pathogens as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford. She has written for Scientific American, Health, WebMD, HHMI Bulletin, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the American Academy of Microbiology. She was a contributing correspondent for Science between 1999 and 2009 and has been the official citation writer for the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation since 2000. Evelyn teaches science  journalism and grant writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and has held several leadership positions in startup enterprises at the intersection of science, communication, and community building. She co-created Science’s website on aging (Science of Aging Knowledge Environment, SAGE KE) and ran its news operation, and she served as the founding executive director of the New York Academy of Science’s web-based initiative, Scientists Without Borders, that aims to improve quality of life in the developing world by mobilizing and coordinating science-based activities. Most recently, she was the founding executive editor of the Multiple Sclerosis Discovery Forum, where she conceived and created online tools, articles, and other resources for investigators.