Ryan Merkley is CEO of a new biotech non-profit, using AI and collaborative science to address areas of market failure in drug development. He is also the Senior Technology Fellow at the Aspen Institute, working across a variety of topics, including AI, open source, intellectual property, data and privacy, and information integrity. He recently served as Managing Director for Aspen Digital, and was Director of its Commission on Information Disorder.
Prior to joining Aspen, Ryan was Chief of Staff at the Wikimedia Foundation. He is an affiliate of the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and the founding chair of the Flickr Foundation. Previously, Ryan served for five years as CEO at Creative Commons, was Chief Operating Officer of Mozilla, served as Director of Corporate Communications for the City of Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Games, and was a Senior Advisor to Mayor David Miller in Toronto, where he led the Mayor’s budget policy and initiated Toronto’s Open Data project.