Lara Mangravite, PhD
President of Sage Bionetworks
Lara Mangravite, PhD, is President of Sage Bionetworks. This organization is focused on the development and implementation of practices for large-scale collaborative biomedical research. Our work is centered on new approaches to scientific process that use open systems to enable community-based research regarding complex biomedical problems. Previously, Dr. Mangravite served as Director of the Systems Biology research group at Sage Bionetworks where she focused on the application of collaborative approaches to advance understanding of disease biology and treatment outcomes at a systems level with the overriding goal of improving clinical care. Dr. Mangravite obtained a BS in Physics from the Pennsylvania State University and a PhD in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University of California, San Francisco. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in cardiovascular pharmacogenomics at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute.
Diane Gary
Vice President, Business Operations
Diane Gary has responsibility for the organization’s finance, human resources, grant management and general business activities. Gary has held similar roles in other early-stage companies, including Rosetta Inpharmatics through the initial funding, IPO and acquisition by Merck & Co. Inc., and KidStar Interactive Media. Most recently, she was HR Director for Merck’s Seattle and San Francisco research sites. Prior experience also includes work with a hospital foundation, with a nonprofit healthcare association, and on the board of the Country Doctor Community Health Centers. Gary holds an MBA degree from the University of Washington.
Justin Guinney, PhD
Vice President, Computational Oncology
Justin Guinney is the Vice President of the Computational Oncology group at Sage Bionetworks. His group contains specialists from multiple domains, including molecular biology, computer science, and oncology, and focuses on the development of computational models for optimizing patient diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment in cancer. Dr. Guinney is an expert at large-scale analysis of genomic data, and works regularly with clinicians to link these models to complex cancer phenotypes. Prior to joining Sage Bionetworks, he co-founded and managed a software company called FiveSight Technologies, now part of Intalio Corp. Dr. Guinney received a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in History, a BS from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in Electrical Engineering, and a PhD from Duke University in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics.
Mike Kellen, PhD
Chief Technology Officer
Michael Kellen leads the technology platforms and services team at Sage Bionetworks. Since 2009, the team has supported open projects and challenges in the collaborative analysis of human health data through the development of the Synapse platform, and by providing support with data hosting, curation, and analysis. The team also supports the collection of human phenotypic data though the development of the Bridge platform. Michael has over 10 years experience developing software for academic and corporate users in the life sciences, and has brought several award-winning products to market in this space covering simulation, data capture and analysis workflow, data integration, and team collaboration. Prior to Sage, Michael held a variety of positions with Teranode corporation since joining as the company’s first employee in 2002, covering product development, field consulting, product management, and development management. Michael completed a doctorate in bioengineering at the University of Washington in 2002 with a focus in computational biology where he also helped develop scientific modeling and simulation technology subsequently licensed by Teranode.
Larsson Omberg, PhD
Vice President, Systems Biology
As the Vice President of Systems Biology, Larsson Omberg oversees a research agenda that focuses both on genomics and participant centered research where data is being collected using remote sensors and mobile phones. The group focuses heavily on using open and team based science to get a large number of external partners to collaborate on data intensive problems. Dr. Omberg has a background in computational biology and has been developing computational methods for genomics analysis and disease modeling. Dr Omberg obtained a MSc in Engineering Physics from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm Sweden and a PhD. from the University of Texas at Austin in Physics before performing a postdoctoral fellowship in Computational Biology and Biostatistics at Cornell University.
John Wilbanks
Chief Commons Officer
John Wilbanks is the Chief Commons Officer at Sage Bionetworks. Previously, Wilbanks worked as a legislative aide to Congressman Fortney “Pete” Stark, served as the first assistant director at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, founded and led to acquisition the bioinformatics company Incellico, Inc., and was executive director of the Science Commons project at Creative Commons. In February 2013, in response to a We the People petition that was spearheaded by Wilbanks and signed by 65,000 people, the U.S. government announced a plan to open up taxpayer-funded research data and make it available for free. Wilbanks holds a B.A. in philosophy from Tulane University and also studied modern letters at the Sorbonne.
Christine Suver, PhD
Director, Research Governance & Ethics
Christine Suver leads the research governance and ethics group at Sage Bionetworks. Since 2009, the group has developed leading models of legal and ethical solutions, policies, governance processes, and tools to enable participant-centered research and open collaborations. One focus is addressing the many ethical and social issues that are emerging with comprehensive data linkage and novel genomic technologies. The group has also developed innovative electronic informed consent (eConsent) for a range of large research initiatives and is exploring the real-world implications of using eConsent to support the autonomous decision of populations with a wide range of cognitive ability. Prior to joining Sage Bionetworks, Dr. Suver held positions at Lifespan Bioscience and Merck & Co. Inc. She earned a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Washington.
Ben Logsdon, PhD
Director, Neurodegenerative Research
Dr. Logsdon is the Director of Neurodegenerative Research at Sage Bionetworks, where he leads consortia wide efforts to analyze ‘omic data generated in the Accelerating Medicine Partnership – Alzheimer’s Disease (AMP-AD) consortium. He also leads the Sage team’s efforts on variant prioritization for generation of new mouse models of late onset Alzheimer’s disease within the MODEL-AD consortium. Dr. Logsdon has made multiple contributions to the fields of statistical genetics, genome-wide association studies, systems biology, machine learning, and cancer biology through the development of new computational techniques to extract signal from high dimensional data. Within the context of Alzheimer’s disease research, he is leading efforts to define robust and reproducible transcriptomic signatures of disease, along with building better community resources to accelerate the identification of novel targets within Alzheimer’s disease via the AMP-AD Knowledge portal (https://ampadportal.org) and Agora (https://agora.ampadportal.org).