We’re thrilled to announce a new team of leaders on the ASAPbio board! Effective September 30, 2020, Prachee Avasthi (Associate Professor, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth) will serve as President, James Fraser (Professor, UCSF, and previously ASAPbio Secretary & Treasurer) as Vice President, Iain Cheeseman (Member, Whitehead Institute; Professor of Biology, MIT) as Treasurer, and Jennifer Lin (Product Director, Meta, CZI) as Secretary.
They will take the reins from Vice President Cynthia Wolberger (Professor, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine) and Interim President Daniel Colón-Ramos (Professor, Yale University School of Medicine). Daniel has served as President since ASAPbio Founder Ron Vale’s departure in early 2020 to serve as Vice President and Executive Director of Janelia Research Campus.
“I am honored to have served during this interim period, which coincided with the COVID pandemic, and important conversations about the role of pre-prints in accelerating accurate dissemination of scientific knowledge and progress,” said Colón-Ramos. “Much has been accomplished by ASAPbio in the past few years to promote transparency and innovation in scientific communication in the life sciences, but much remains to be achieved. As a scientist, as a colleague and as a member of ASAPbio, I am incredibly excited about the new leadership and where their vision will take the organization in this important new phase.”
James Fraser, whose lab studies protein conformational dynamics, was an attendee at the first ASAPbio meeting in 2016. He’s been serving as both Secretary and Treasurer since the early days of the organization and brings a deep understanding of the history of the organization into his new role as Vice President. “The life science publishing and communication landscape has changed so much since ASAPbio started!” Fraser said. “I’m looking forward to working with Prachee, Iain, and Jennifer as we push forward on making the entire experience more rapid, equitable, and transparent in the years to come.”
In addition to running a lab investigating ciliary assembly in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, incoming President Prachee Avasthi is the founder of New PI Slack, serves on the board of directors of eLife and the steering committee of Rescuing Biomedical Research, and has been a member of the ASAPbio board since 2018. “I am honored to take on this role to help promote more open and rapid scientific communication,” she said. “ASAPbio has been hugely influential to me by inspiring broad sharing and dialogue for my own work. I hope to be able to give something back by accelerating positive change within the scientific community, funders, and other stakeholders.”
