Archives: People

Frank Vrancken Peeters joined Springer Nature in 2017 as Chief Commercial Officer and became CEO in September 2019.

He has spent more than 25 years in the media and publishing sectors, with leadership roles across a range of strategic and delivery business functions in both business-to-business and business-to-consumer contexts.

Frank has previously had senior positions at: Wolters Kluwer, where he was Regional Managing Director, Legal and Regulatory, Western Europe; at Infinitas Learning, where he was Chief Operating Officer; and Elsevier Science, where he served as MD Government and Academic Markets, MD ScienceDirect and MD Global Sales, in each case building and growing significant-scale, complex international businesses.

Frank holds a Master’s in Business Administration from the Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Kumsal Bayazit was appointed Chief Executive Officer of Elsevier in February 2019. She has held multiple positions with RELX Group since 2004, most recently as Regional President Europe, Middle East and Africa at Reed Exhibitions. Before joining Reed Exhibitions in 2016, Kumsal was RELX Group’s Chief Strategy Officer, responsible for driving strategic initiatives, technology strategy and portfolio management. Prior to that she served in several operational and strategic roles with LexisNexis.

Kumsal also chairs the Technology Forum at RELX Group. Prior to joining RELX Group in 2004, Kumsal spent several years at Bain & Company in their New York, Los Angeles, Johannesburg and Sydney offices.

Kumsal earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley where she received a Bachelor’s degree in Economics with Honours.

Dawn Melley is Acting Managing Director, Publications, for IEEE, where she provides strategic leadership and general management oversight for IEEE’s publishing program, including content acquisition, review, and curation; indexing and digital asset management; editorial processing, including copy editing and content transformation; and delivery of products in various formats, digital as well as print. Dawn and the Publications management team work with IEEE’s talented volunteers to develop strategic priorities for the organization and turn those priorities into successfully implemented operational initiatives, ensuring operational excellence through effective leadership of a team of publishing professionals.

During her 20 years at IEEE, Dawn has held leadership positions within the Publications group, most recently as Senior Director, Publishing Operations, where she directed publishing services in support of IEEE’s periodicals. Prior to joining IEEE, Dawn held editorial leadership positions with Reed Elsevier and Thomson Reuters.

Rachael Harper is a marketing and communications specialist with 17 years’ experience working within the public and private sectors, both in-house and agency side.

Prior to joining IOP Publishing, she was Associate Director of the Business and Corporate division at Speed Communications, providing strategic communications and marketing direction to a broad range of clients spanning the financial, technology, healthcare and education sectors.

She spent 11 years at the London Stock Exchange Group, where she led communications for the Group’s risk management arm, LCH. During her time there was responsible for all internal and external communications strategy and planning, with a particular focus on regulatory compliance initiatives, mergers and acquisitions and crisis management. She was instrumental in managing the reputation of the company during the high-profile defaults of Lehman Brother’s and MF Global.

She has consulted for global energy and commodities trading firm, Vitol, where she developed and implemented community engagement programmes across Western Africa and the UAE.

She has a specialist interest in influencer engagement, industry thought leadership and broader corporate communications.

Erin Wiringi is a communications and marketing professional with extensive experience driving strategic growth and directing communications efforts across a range of publishing and media outlets. As the Director, Marketing Communications and Community Development, in the Publications Division of the American Chemical Society, Erin focuses on communicating the value of the organization’s publishing output to a global community of authors, reviewers, librarians, ACS members and the greater scientific research community.

Since joining the ACS in 2013, she has conceptualized, built and delivered campaigns to reach and foster relationships with these critically important audiences, while concurrently working on industry-wide communications projects. Prior to joining ACS, Erin managed digital marketing for the Brookings Institution Press, owned a New Zealand-based company focused on a strategic business-to-consumer advertising model, and managed key marketing and sponsorship campaigns for radio and newspaper.

Michael Stebbins is a geneticist, and public policy expert who served as the Assistant Director for Biotechnology in the Obama White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He is currently the President of Science Advisors, a science and health consulting firm he founded in 2018 to provide science, technology, and public policy guidance to private companies, philanthropies, and non-profit organizations.

While at the White House, Dr. Stebbins developed eight Executive Orders and other Federal directives addressing issues ranging from the antibiotic resistance crisis in the US to restoring pollinator health. His work led to broad changes in practice across the Federal government regarding the purchasing of bio-based products, improving veterans’ mental health, increasing access to federally funded scientific research publications and data, improving scientific reproducibility, evaluating and addressing the preferential purchasing of antibiotic free meats, reforming the regulatory system for biotechnology products, and improving the management of scientific collections. He was also the staff lead on numerous PCAST reports to the President including reports on Propelling Innovation in Drug Discovery, Development , and Evaluation; Combatting Antibiotic Resistance; and Agricultural Preparedness & the United States Agricultural Research Enterprise.

He served as the Vice President of Science and Technology for the Laura and John Arnold Foundation where he was responsible for identifying and pursuing opportunities for philanthropic investment in Science and Technology. His work at the Foundation addressed a broad set of critical issues including FDA transparency, scientific reproducibility, open science, clinical trials recruitment, challenges to the Renewable Fuels Standard, improving organ donation rates, and initiatives to leverage the intellectual property sitting on shelves of universities and Federal agencies, creating over 80 cancer research and development companies in two years.

In 2017, he helped launch the Value in Cancer Care Consortium (VI3C) to develop and run clinical trials on the most expensive chemotherapy drugs, with the aim of optimizing delivery and reducing the costs of treatment based on evidence. He also helped launch, and chairs the board for, Vivli, an organization developing a clinical trial data-sharing platform for universities and pharmaceutical companies.

Dr. Stebbins serves on the National Academies of Science, Board on Research Data and Information and has served on the US Government’s Invasive Species Advisory Committee Task Force on advanced biotechnologies. He serves on the advisory Boards for Datavant, and Amida Technologies.

Dr. Stebbins previously served as a science advisor to the Obama Presidential Campaign and helped organize 95 Nobel Laureates in Science to endorse then Senator Obama for President and served on the Obama White House Transition Team focusing on the Executive Office of the President. He is the former director of biology policy for the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) where he led their biosecurity project. His work at FAS led to changes in how agents are trained to interact with scientists at the FBI Training Academy at Quantico and his team developed the first tools to train scientists on dual-use research of concern. He co-founded, and served on the board of directors for, Scientists and Engineers for America, and served as President of Scientists and Engineers for America Action Fund. Dr. Stebbins worked as a legislative fellow for U.S. Senator Harry Reid and a public policy fellow for the National Human Genome Research Institute. He is a former adjunct professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to Washington, he was a senior editor at Nature Genetics. He received his B.S. in biology at SUNY Stony Brook and his Ph.D. in genetics while working at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Dennis Brown is currently Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and is Director of Program in Membrane Biology at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He also serves as the Chief Science Officer of the American Physiological Society (APS). He received his Ph. D. from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK in 1975 and then spent 10 years working under the direction of Dr. Lelio Orci at the University of Geneva Medical School in Switzerland, where he eventually became an Assistant Professor.

Dennis Brown is a cell biologist/physiologist who specializes in the use of state-of-the art imaging techniques to follow and dissect physiologically-relevant membrane protein trafficking events in epithelial and non-epithelial cells. He is an internationally recognized authority on membrane protein trafficking in epithelial cells, with special focus on water channels (aquaporins) and vacuolar proton pumping ATPase function in the kidney and, more recently, in the male reproductive tract. His work is aimed at understanding basic cell physiology in order to develop novel therapeutic strategies for kidney disease and male infertility. He has published over 400 articles in peer reviewed journals.

He was Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Physiology (Cell Physiology) until July 2008, and was the Editor-in-Chief of Physiological Reviews from 2009 – 2018, one of the World’s most highly cited scientific journals. He has previously served on the editorial board of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, the Journal of Membrane Biology and the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

He has received numerous awards including the Carl Gottschalk Award for excellence in nephrology research from the APS Renal Section in 1999, the Hugh Davson Award for excellence in cell biology research from the APS Cell Section in 2011, and he was an Established Investigator of the American Heart Association from 1987-1992. He was the invited plenary lecturer on aquaporins at the Silver Anniversary meeting of the American Society of Nephrology (ASN). He gave the Robert Schrier endowed lecture at the 2008 ASN meeting, gave the Suk-Ki Hong Endowed Lectureship in Physiology at the University of Buffalo in 2008, the Dunaway Burnham Endowed Lectureship at Dartmouth College in 2005, and was the Daniel Kline Endowed lecturer in Systems Biology and Physiology at the University of Cincinnati in 2009. He gave the prestigious Robert Berliner Lecture in Renal Physiology at the 2013 meeting of the International Union of Physiological Sciences in Birmingham, UK, and he received an honorary degree for his contributions to cell biology and physiology from his alma mater (University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK) also in 2013. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish Epithelia Physiology Group in 2017.

He is the Director of the MGH Office for Research Career Development (ORCD) and has an outstanding track record of developing young scientists, both basic researchers and clinical investigators. He was awarded the prestigious A. Clifford Barger “Excellence in Mentoring” award from Harvard University in 2005 and received the HMS Dean’s Award for the Advancement of Women in Science in 2012.

He has obtained continuous support from the NIH since arriving in the USA in 1985 and one of his current grants received rare “MERIT” Award status (10 years of support) in 2009. This grant was recently renewed for 5 years. He has a second RO1 in the area of kidney physiology, and is also a co-investigator on two other RO1s. He is the Microscopy Core Director on two P30 grants (in the areas of Diabetes and Inflammatory Bowel Disease,). He is the PI of 5 recent shared instrumentation (large equipment) grants from NIH. In addition, he directs a Core facility that provides sophisticated microscopy services to MGH and the entire Harvard research community.

Finally, Dr. Brown was a member and the past chair of the NIH KMBD/MBKD Study Section (2008-2014), which specializes in renal physiology and urinary tract development.

Dean Sanderson is the Chief Strategy Officer at AIP Publishing. Based in the New York area, he is responsible for publishing, sales, and marketing as well as managing strategic planning at the organization.

Dean joined AIP Publishing in November 2020 after twelve years at Springer Nature and Nature Publishing Group. After the merger between NPG and Springer, he was Managing Director of Nature Research Group, the operating unit that published Nature and the Nature-branded journals, before later becoming Managing Director of Magazines and Partner Services at SN. He had a long association with Scientific American, serving as its President from 2016-2020. Prior to the SN merger, Dean led institutional sales and marketing at NPG.