As Chief of Strategic Initiatives, Stern works closely with HHMI’s President and senior leadership team to formulate strategic scientific and educational initiatives that apply across programmatic departments and takes a lead role in coordinating those initiatives.

In this role, he has overseen the development and implementation of HHMI’s open access policies, securing immediate open access for the vast majority of HHMI research — first through journal publications and, beginning in 2026, through preprints. He has also helped shift HHMI’s internal review processes to emphasize researcher-shared outputs like preprints over editor-selected outputs like journal articles.

Before joining HHMI, Stern served for eight years as Director of Research Affairs at the Harvard Center for Systems Biology, where he helped to manage the Bauer Fellows Program, a unique initiative for early careers scientists to run independent research groups. He also has worked as a senior scientific editor at Cell.

Stern earned a PhD in biochemistry from University College, London, and an MA in biochemistry from the University of Tübingen, in Germany. His primary research explored how cells control and coordinate their cell division cycle.

Selected Writings
Loren Frank’s HHMI lab at UCSF has pioneered an ambitious framework for sharing vast neuroscience datasets and complicated analysis methods, a step towards tipping the culture of science towards more effective and fruitful collaboration.