Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard

Harvard Kennedy School of Government | Harvard University
Adam Bly

Adam Bly

https://adambly.com/

Adam Bly was a Visiting Senior Fellow with the STS Program from 2013-2015. With a unifying mission of modernizing science’s place in society, he created Seed, ScienceBlogs, and Visualizing. He is currently CEO of Data and AI Startup (Stealth Mode). He was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and is a recipient of the Golden Jubilee Medal from Queen Elizabeth II. He has lectured widely on the role of science in modern society, including at the: World Economic Forum in Davos, Royal Society, Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, STS Forum, Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, National Academies of Science, National Science Board, U.S Department of State, U.S. House of Representatives, NIH, NASA, and Museum of Modern Art, as well as at universities including Harvard, MIT, and Peking.

He serves as Vice Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Complex Systems, and member of the Science Advisory Committee of the World Economic Forum, the Council of Canadian Academies Expert Panel on the State of Canada’s Science Culture, and the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science. He is the editor of Science is Culture: Conversations at the New Intersection of Science + Society (HarperCollins). He began his career studying cell adhesion and metastasis at the National Research Council of Canada. Out of the lab, he founded Seed Magazine and served as its Editor-in-Chief. “The best comparison for Seed,” wrote a media critic at the time of the magazine’s launch in 2001, “is the early years of Rolling Stone, when music was less a subject than a lens for viewing culture.” Under Bly’s leadership, the magazine — tag-lined “Science is Culture™” — earned critical acclaim for modernizing scientific publishing and for bridging long-standing divides between science and society, from art and design to politics and religion. In 2006, he founded ScienceBlogs.com, the first science blogging network. In 2010, he founded Visualizing.org, now the leading online platform for data visualization. And in 2012, he formed Seed Scientific.

He has served on various nominating committees, juries, and boards, including the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, the Earth Award, the Science Advisory Committee of the World Economic Forum, the External Advisory Board of the University of Michigan’s Risk Science Center, the American Committee of the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Communications Advisory Board of the National Academy of Sciences, OECD’s Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies, and the Council of Canadian Academies’ Expert Panel on the State of Canada’s Science Culture. He served as Vice Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Design Innovation, and now serves as Vice Chair of the Global Agenda Council on Complex Systems. He recently advised the Executive Coordinator’s Office of Rio+20, the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, and is currently advising the United Nations on data-driven decision-making around the Post-2015 Millenium Development Goals process.

Born in Montreal, he now lives in New York City.

Note: The above information concerns a past fellow at the Program on Science, Technology, and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School. It does not constituent evidence of current enrollment. The information may be out of date. To update their information, past fellows should e-mail the site administrator.