People

Geoff is a director of the Digitalis Commons. He is also the founder and Managing Partner of Digitalis Ventures.

Geoff co-founded and was a General Partner of Ascent Biomedical Ventures, a New York City-based venture capital firm focused on early-stage life sciences investments. Geoff currently represents Ascent on the Board of Directors for Azevan Pharmaceuticals, BlinkBio, and Orchestra BioMed, and is a Board Observer of Vivasure Medical.

Geoff serves as a Trustee of The Jackson Laboratory. He is a Visiting Scholar at Rockefeller University and an adjunct faculty member at the RU Center for Clinical and Translational Science. Geoff also serves as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston. Previously, he was the founding Director of the Mount Sinai Institute of Technology and a Professor in the Department of Population Health Science and Policy at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Geoff received a B.A. (with honors) from Williams College and a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

John Wilbanks is a director of the Digitalis Commons. He is also the Chief Commons Officer at Sage Bionetworks and a Senior Fellow at Faster Cures. 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.

Dac Nguyen is a director of the Digitalis Commons. He is also a Technical Partner at Digitalis Ventures. He received his Ph.D. in biophysics from Mount Sinai and A.B. in physics from Harvard. His interests include physical and computational approaches to problems in biophysics, genomics and synthetic biology.

Daniel is the Chief Technology Officer of the Digitalis Commons. He is a veteran technology leader in the NYC area, having built high-performing teams and innovative products for Citibank, Mount Sinai, Amplify Education (a News Corp division), Goldman Sachs, TheStreet.com, Consumer Reports, Zagat, Scholastic, Kaplan Test Prep, History.com, and more. Daniel received a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a bunch of gray hairs from pushing the edge of what’s possible.