BOARD OF ADVISORS

Brian Greene

Brian Greene

Dr. Brian Greene is a Key Advisor and a Member of our Board of Advisors. In addition to being Director of Columbia University’s Center for Theoretical Physics, Dr. Brian Greene is the co-founder of the World Science Festival and the author of a new book, "Until the End of Time", which is about mind, matter and the human search for meaning in an evolving universe. The mission of the World Science Festival is to bring live and digital science programming to broad public audiences.

Prineha Narang

Prineha Narang

Professor Prineha Narang leads an interdisciplinary group in theoretical and computational science at UCLA. Before her move to UCLA, she was a Professor of Computational Materials Science at Harvard University. Dr. Narang has earned prestigious honors such as the Maria Goeppert Mayer Award, MRS' Outstanding Early Career Investigator Award, Mildred Dresselhaus Prize, Bessel Research Award, NSF CAREER Award, and Moore Inventor Fellowship. Additionally, she's the founder and Chief Technology Officer of Aliro, a company specializing in quantum networks and a U.S. Science Envoy for the State Department.

Richard Sever

Richard Sever

Dr. Richard Sever is the co-founder of the preprint servers, bioRxiv and medRxiv and assistant director at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press in New York. He was the initiator of the Cold Spring Harbor Molecular Case Studies journal, focusing on precision medicine, and an editor for Current Opinion in Cell Biology, Trends in Biochemical Sciences, and Journal of Cell Science. His academic background includes a biochemistry degree from Oxford University and a PhD in molecular biology from Cambridge University.

Arsalan Farooq

Arsalan Farooq

Mr. Arsalan Farooq is an accomplished Product and Technology Executive and Entrepreneur, who is currently a Product Leader @ Google Cloud and a mentor at Alchemist Accelerator in the San Francisco Bay Area. Prior to Google, he served as the CEO of Netifi (Open Source Microservices Developer Platform). Key areas of his expertise include Private, Public & Hybrid Cloud, Microservice/Serverless Architectures, Cloud-native Applications, Big Data Analytics, Application Networking and Security, Open Source models, IoT, DevOps, Digital Transformation, and IT Infrastructure.

Charles W. Clark

Charles W. Clark

Dr. Charles W. Clark is a renowned scientist who dedicated over 30 years of service to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and held a position as a program manager at the Office of Naval Research. His accolades include the Award for Information Technology Achievement, the Gold Medal from the U.S. Department of Commerce, the R&D 100 Award, the Distinguished Presidential Rank Award, the U.S. Senior Executive Service honor, the Physical Sciences Award from the Washington Academy of Sciences, and the 2002 Archie Mahan Prize from the Optical Society of America. Dr. Clark's breadth of expertise covers a wide array of advanced technologies and government policies, notably in quantum computing and artificial intelligence.

SCIENTIFIC BOARD

Dr. Steinn Sigurdsson

Dr. Steinn Sigurdsson

Dr. Steinn Sigurðsson is Scientific Director at arXiv, the world's premier scientific data repository and is Professor of Astronomy at Penn State University. With over 100 publications in astronomy and astrophysics, garnering nearly 10,000 citations, his research is recognized and funded by institutions like NASA and NSF. Alongside Dr. Galitski, he contributes to the board of the Aspen Center for Physics and spearheads its private fundraising. At arXiv, Dr. Sigurðsson not only shapes long-term strategies but also founded and directs arXiv Labs, fostering community contributions and innovative tools like Litmaps, Connected Papers, and Hugging Face.

Victor Galitski

Victor Galitski

Dr. Victor Galitski is the Chesapeake Chair Professor of Physics at the Joint Quantum Institute and University of Maryland, honorary professor at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and Editor of Annals of Physics. He holds two PhDs in applied mathematics and quantum physics. Victor is an author of more than 150 publications and the book "Exploring Quantum Mechanics," published by Oxford in 2013. Based on this book, Victor has developed a massive open online course, "Exploring Quantum Physics," which has been taken by over 200,000 students world-wide. Victor received the Simons Investigator Award, Soros Fellowship, NSF career award, and Future Fellowship from Australian Research Council. His research has been funded by the DOE, NSF, U.S. Army Research Office, IARPA, DARPA, and private foundations.

John Beverley

John Beverley

Dr. John Beverley is an established expert at the intersection of knowledge graph engineering, formal logic, and semantic web technologies. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Buffalo researching topics at the intersection of Applied Ontology and formal logic and he is a Vice President of the National Center for Ontological Research. Prior to that position, he was a Senior Ontologist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, where he remains an Ontology Consultant. Dr. Beverley received his PhD from Northwestern University in 2021 in Philosophy, a Masters in Philosophy from the State University of New York, at Buffalo in 2017, and a Bachelor of Science in Philosophy and Logic from NC State University in 2011.

OPERATING TEAM

Andrew Jiranek

Andrew Jiranek

Mr. Jiranek is a co-founder and our CEO. He is an experienced corporate attorney who has worked with start-up and emerging companies for over 30 years. He has helped many management teams, both in-house, and as outside counsel, to structure, start-up and develop new business enterprises in deep tech and life sciences. He has assisted them with protecting IP, raising working capital and building out scientific and management teams. Mr. Jiranek is well versed in national and international tax, IP, securities, employment, regulatory, real estate and contractual issues encountered by emerging enterprises. He has assisted with raising capital from individual, institutional, public and quasi-public sources. While managing ScienceCast’s emerging phase, Mr. Jiranek also undertakes business development and legal work for select corporate clients. Mr. Jiranek graduated from William and Mary Law School with a J.D. and from Princeton with an A.B. in Economics.

Kristina Perevedentseva

Kristina Perevedentseva

Ms. Perevedentseva is a digital marketing program manager and works closely to support our digital marketing efforts on behalf of our research customers. She handles project management for marketing, posting on related social media sites, reaching out to our customers to assist them with promoting their research and managing our integration to our ecosystem of research providers. Kristina has a law degree and an MBA from Strayer University.

Vacheh Joakim

Vacheh Joakim

Vacheh Joakim is our Director of Sales & Marketing. He joined us in July 2022, and has focused his efforts on digital marketing as we scale our user base. Mr. Joakim is based in Los Angeles, California. Mr. Joakim has over eighteen years of hands-on SEO and content development, managerial and executive experience in web marketing and development, including in-depth knowledge of the organic search landscape and its history, as well as technical capabilities in web development technologies such as HTML, CSS, PHP, SQL, and JavaScript. Mr. Joakim founded a business providing contract services known as Evolutionary Business Arts in 2009 and has been operating it since its founding. From 2007 to 2009, Mr. Joakim was Director of Operations for Submit Express, Inc. where he led a group of twenty link developers, writers, optimizers, and engineers delivering successful SEO campaigns to over 600 active clients, generating $6MM in yearly revenue. Prior to that, Mr. Joakim held a variety of positions as Director of SEO and SEO lead.

Carter Benson

Carter Benson

Carter Benson serves as our ontology project manager. His responsibilities include coordinating project tasks, guiding the application of ontological principles in various domains, and collaborating closely with both academic and professional teams to enhance the efficacy and reach of these projects. Working closely with Dr. Beverley, Mr. Benson's responsibilities extend to enhancing the integration of ontological practices within our project framework. Mr. Benson received his master’s degree in philosophy in 2019 from the University at Buffalo and is continuing his education at UB in pursuit of his PhD.

Anton Fevilov

Anton Fevilov

Anton Fefilov is a co-founder and has been our lead software programmer since our founding. He is a full stack programmer responsible for the development of the software tools we implement and embed in our website. Mr. Fefilov has been working for us since our founding from a variety of overseas locations. Mr. Fefilov has been working for the past twelve (12) years on various software development projects with teams of experienced web and iOS developers, designers, product managers and product owners. Within these projects, Mr. Fefilov was responsible for contributing to the architecture of applications, working on performance, fixing bugs, writing tests, reviewing code, writing API for mobile devices, implementing new features both on backend and frontend sides, doing every effort to write clean, odorless code covered with integration and unit tests.

About

ScienceCast is a free open-access platform for researchers to disseminate their scientific results and ideas to a wide audience of fellow scientists, journal Editors, grant program managers, and other professionals working at the cutting edge of science and innovation. The project was launched by a group of academics in collaboration with arXiv.org in response to the following obvious problems facing all scientific disciplines:

  1. Exponential proliferation of data. Just 20-30 years ago, it was possible for a professional scientist to follow all important developments in their field. But it is no longer the case. 90% of world’s data was created in the last two years and the process is accelerating. Whether it is medicine or physics or social sciences, it is no longer possible to stay on top of relevant papers that appear daily.
  2. Lack of a high-quality collaboration platform for scientists. While social media platforms abound, there is no collaboration platform for scientists to discuss new developments and exchange their related ideas and results in a professional setting. Most existing social media platforms suffer from the ubiquity of low-quality content, which has a distracting effect on focus and prevents meaningful conversations from occurring. It is highly desirable to have a collaboration space intended for scientists and moderated and managed by scientists to enable a continuous dialogue and collaboration among experts on the most important topics in their disciplines.
  3. Shortcomings of the traditional peer review process. Scientific journals play a critical role in sharing and creating knowledge. However, the exponential data proliferation problem presents a serious challenge to journal Editors, handling the large and growing volume of submissions, and the traditional peer-review model all together. Most authors are familiar with the scenario where a manuscript, written after a months-long sometimes years-long research project, is rejected in a cavalier way based on superficial comments by a referee. On the other hand, questionable papers sometimes get accepted and promoted. Peer review, which used to imply a long and deep analysis of scientific manuscripts, became a bit of a gamble – a one-time event, which dictates the fate of a research paper in a somewhat random fashion.

While there is no silver bullet to solve these existential problems once and for all, ScienceCast proposes a model, where the key problem associated with the growing volume of scientific data is presented front and center. The proposed solution is based on the observation that the younger generation of scientists consumes information differently from the previous generations (not “better” not “worse” but differently, and it is a fact) and there is a constant competition for attention from highly addictive media. The central component of the platform is a stream of ScienceCasts – short 3–5-minute video elevator pitches directly linked to actual old-fashioned manuscripts. The goal of a pitch is to present the context & motivation for research and the main research result(s) in a concise manner giving users the option to further explore the details (or not). A collaboration environment will be built around the casts and enable a dialogue between the author(s) and their peers, potentially paving the way for a continuous peer review process.

In addition to a built-in ranking system and AI-based algorithm (currently in development) to select content for a particular user, based on their preferences, the platform will be moderated as needed by a board of professional scientists to ensure high professional standards of the activity on sciencecast.org

ScienceCast’s pledge is to prioritize the needs of the scientific communities and protect its users and their data. The ultimate goal of ScienceCast - a digital ecosystem for research built by scientists for scientists – is to make it into a social good.

We hope you find content here worth creating and consuming.

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