Award Categories

Communications Award

This award recognizes making biomedical science and human research understandable to broader audiences.

Award Champion: PersonalGenomes.org
Diversity Award

This award recognizes excellence in promoting diversity in human research.

Award Champion: Health Data Exploration Project (HDE), with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Governance Award

This award recognizes innovative methods for conducting ethical human subjects research.

Award Champion: Open Humans, with support from PersonalGenomes.org
Participant Pioneer Award

This award recognizes people who have blazed new trails as research participants.

Award Champion: PatientsLikeMe
People's Choice Award

This award recognizes excellence in biomedical and human research, as voted on by members of the Open Humans community.

Award Champion: The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Sharing Award

This award recognizes excellence in making biomedical research more open, equitable or transparent.

Award Champion: Mozilla Science Lab
Toolmaker Award

This award recognizes the people behind a new tool, platform, website, app, or service that facilitates participant-centered research.

Award Champion: Mozilla Science Lab

Meet our judges

Misha Angrist was the fourth participant in the Personal Genome Project (PGP). He has chronicled the development of the project and his own participation in it in his book, Here is a Human Being: At the Dawn of Personal Genomics (HarperCollins, 2010). A geneticist by training, he believes that the benefits of genomic technology will never be realized without the active involvement of the public. He is an Assistant Professor in the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy.
Madeleine Ball is Director of Research at PersonalGenomes.org and co-founder of Open Humans (www.openhumans.org). Madeleine has also been Director of Research at the Harvard Personal Genome Project – a position she still holds today. At PGP Harvard she’s contributed to various aspects, including research collaborations, participant communications, and open genome interpretation methods. Work with PGP Harvard has been the inspiration for Open Humans by her and Jason Bobe. Through Open Humans, Madeleine wants to enable people to have an ongoing connection to their data and research, helping them receive and share data with diverse studies.
Cinnamon Bloss is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego and an adjunct policy analyst at the J. Craig Venter Institute. Her research interests focus on the individual and societal impacts of emerging biomedical technologies. Major projects have included studies of direct-to-consumer genomics, clinical genome sequencing, biosensors and mobile health, and personal health big data. Dr. Bloss was recently awarded an R01 grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute’s (NHGRI) Ethical Legal and Social Issues program to pursue the development of tools to understand privacy preferences of individuals who are exposed to health big data technologies.
Abigail Cabunoc Mayes (@abbycabs), is the lead developer of the Mozilla Science Lab, an initiative of the Mozilla Foundation working to make research collaborative, accessible and usable. She has led development on various open source science projects such as Contributorship Badges for Science, which awards badges to authors on academic papers, and WormBase, a central data repository for the model organism C. elegans. Before joining Mozilla, Abby worked as a bioinformatics software developer at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and at Michigan State University. With a background in bioinformatics and computer science, she builds tools that use the web to move science forward.
John Cammack is the Founder and Managing Partner of Cammack Associates, a holding company with diversified interests in educational technology and brain fitness. John is a Mentor-In-Residence at Johns Hopkins University, a member of the Cure Violence, Baltimore Corp and Venture for America – Baltimore boards. From 1991 to 2009, John was a senior executive at T. Rowe Price and served as Chairman of the Mutual Fund Education Alliance, a member of the Finra Investment Committee, the CFP Board of Standards and the Phi Beta Kappa Investment Committee. John is a graduate of Denison University and received his MBA from Columbia University.
George Church, PhD is Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, Wyss Institute, Director of the Center for Computational Genetics, Director of the NIH Center for Excellence in Genomic Science (on human genome engineering), founder of the Personal Genome Project, president of the nonprofit PersonalGenomes.org and guinea pig #1. He is a member of the NAS and NAE and Franklin Laureate for Achievement in Science.
Pronabesh DasMahapatra is a Research Scientist at PatientsLikeMe. He specializes in clinical research, epidemiology and applied biostatistics. After graduating from medical school, he received Masters of Public Health (Epidemiology) from Tulane University. During his tenure at Tulane University, he researched the early natural history of cardiovascular diseases and its progression from birth to middle-age. In the last 5 years, Pronabesh has been involved in observational and experimental research across healthcare organizations. He has applied innovative statistical methods on several studies including NIH funded behavioral interventions, surveys, patient registry database and patient-reported outcome analyses. He has also led investigations on post-marketing surveillance (phase IV) of prescription opioids and behavioral subtyping of college students based on alcohol/drug use and risky behavior patterns. More recently, he has been involved in methods that utilize patient-reported data to elicit preferences among individuals with life-changing chronic illness. His work is documented in several peer reviewed publications and book chapters.
Esther Dyson is PGP research subject #3 and the founder of hiccup.co, for Health Initiative Coordinating Council. HICCup runs The Way to Wellville [at hiccup.co], an open-source, evidence-generating accelerator devoted to defining and implementing proven models for producing community health (not health care) that will return profits to investors and health to participants. The accelerator is working with five US communities over the next five years to accelerate their efforts and give their successes and (educational) failures visibility. Its slogan: “Don’t rent your health. Invest in it!” Aside from that, Dyson spends her time investing in and nurturing start-ups, with recent focus on health care and aerospace. She is an investor in 23andMe (also a director), Applied Proteomics, CUR, Eligible API, Genomera, GeriJoy, Health Loop, Health Tap, i2Dx, Keas (also an advisor), Medivo, mEquilibrium, Omada Health, PatientsLikeMe, PatientsKnowBest (UK), Resilient, Sleepio (UK), StartupHealth, Tocagen, Valkee (Finland), Vital Score, VitaPortal (Russia, also an advisor) and Voxiva (also a director). Photo credit: Tom Gruber.
An active investor in early stage private companies in the life sciences and big data sectors, Juan Enriquez is one of the world’s leading authorities on the uses and benefits of genomic code. He is the co-author of Evolving Ourselves: How Unnatural Selection and Nonrandom Mutation are Shaping Life on Earth (Penguin; March 2015) which describes a world where humans increasingly shape their environment, themselves, and other species. He is also the author of the global bestseller As The Future Catches You and The Untied States of America, and co-author of Homo Evolutis. Juan writes, speaks, and teaches about the profound changes that genomics and other life sciences will cause in business, technology, politics and society. He is one the TED all-stars. He and Bill Gates were the first outside guest curators for TED. He was the founding director of the Harvard Business School Life Sciences Project and is on the Harvard Medical School Advisory Council. He has published papers and articles in a wide variety of forums including The Harvard Business Review, Foreign Policy, Science, Nature, and the New York Times.
Steven Keating is a doctoral candidate at the MIT Media Lab who is developing novel platforms for 3D printing, synthetic biological fabrication, and designed growth of the next generation of products. Curiosity drives his research and also saved his life through the accidental discovery of a baseball-sized cancerous brain tumor found in a voluntary academic scan. With his tumor successfully removed through awake brain surgery in 2014, Steven is an advocate for open patient data and curiosity. From gears to genomes, he is interested in exploring new design possibilities, open health data networks, and asking if we can have a “share” button for health. www.stevenkeating.info, stevenk@mit.edu, @stevenkeating
Michelle Meyer, J.D., Ph.D. (@michellenmeyer; www.michellenmeyer.com) is Assistant Professor and Director of Bioethics Policy in the Clarkson–Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai Bioethics Program, where her research focuses on research ethics and regulation; genetics; reproduction; applications of behavioral science to law and policy; and legal and ethical obstacles to evidence-based policy and practice. Previously, she was an Academic Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center, a Greenwall Fellow at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown, and a Research Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She earned a Ph.D. in religious studies, with a focus on applied ethics, from the University of Virginia and a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Her writing has appeared in leading journals of law, science, and bioethics, in popular media outlets including the New York Times, the L.A. Times, Slate, and Wired, and at Forbes, where she is a contributor. She is on the Advisory Boards of the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium and Making Science Less WEIRD. She is a member of the Board of Directors of PersonalGenomes.org and a PGP participant.
Ryan Phelan is the Executive Director of Revive and Restore, a project within The Long Now Foundation, with a mission to provide deep ecological enrichment through extinct species revival. Phelan was founder and former CEO of DNA Direct, which provides genetic testing services and decision support for patients, providers and healthcare payors. In 2010, DNA Direct became a wholly owned subsidiary of Medco Health Solutions, one of the country’s largest pharmacy benefit managers. Phelan has been a strong consumer health advocate for the past 25 years, having started the first medical library for consumers in 1978. As Founding Director of Planetree, a nonprofit consumer health care organization, she helped create a national model for humanizing hospitals, and a national model for providing health information to the public, the Planetree Resource Center. In 1995 she founded Direct Medical Knowledge (DMK). DMK was an extensive consumer health web site highly regarded for its unique content depth and innovative search interface. It was acquired by WebMD in 1999. She was also co-founder of the ALL Species Foundation in 2002, a global science initiative to discover all life on Earth, which evolved into the Encyclopedia of Life. She is on the board of PersonalGenomes.org.
Prabhjot Singh, MD (@prabhjotsinghNY) is Director of the Arnhold Institute for Global Health (@ai4gh) and Vice Chairman of Medicine for Population Health at the Mount Sinai Health System, as well as Special Advisor for Strategy and Design at the Peterson Center for Healthcare. In 2013, he co-founded the One Million Community Health Worker Campaign with Jeffrey Sachs, which is an initiative of the African Union and UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. In 2015 he was invited to join the UN Broadband Commission’s Information and Communication Technologies working group to build scalable health platforms to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. In 2016, his Arnhold Institute team, in partnership with the UN Secretary General Special Envoy’s Office, will launch the Health Equity Atlas of Africa, an open framework to drive collaboration between data scientists, health system experts and frontline health workers.
Kaitlin Thaney (@kaythaney) is the director of the Mozilla Science Lab, an open science initiative of the Mozilla Foundation that facilitates learning around open source, open data and offers fellowships for early career researchers. Prior to Mozilla, Kaitlin served as the Manager of External Partnerships at Digital Science, a technology company that works to make research more efficient through better use of technology. Kaitlin also formerly advised the UK government on infrastructure for data intensive science and business, served as a Director for DataKind UK, and is the founding co-chair for the Strata Conference series in London on big data. Prior to Mozilla and Digital Science, Kaitlin managed the science program at Creative Commons, worked with MIT and Microsoft, and wrote for the Boston Globe.

Thanks to our media partners

Ceremony

Date and Time: 6:00pm on April 25, 2016
Location: Harvard Medical School
To attend, you must be a registered attendee of either the GET Conference or GET Labs.