OPERATING TEAM
Erin Sharoni
Erin Sharoni, MBE, is the Chief Executive Officer of ScienceCast. She brings over 17 years of experience driving multi-million-dollar growth across the Biotechnology, Digital Health, Media, and Finance sectors. She has deep expertise in product and brand development, artificial intelligence integration, strategic communications, and go-to-market strategy. As a product executive in the biotechnology sector, she spearheaded the production of AI-enabled tools to enhance human health and focused on aligning technological innovation with diverse user needs and ethical considerations. Erin is a bioethics researcher on the NIH Bridge to Artificial Intelligence program to advance the biomedical adoption of AI. She holds a Master’s in Bioethics from Harvard Medical School, a Master’s in Biology from Harvard University, and a Bachelor’s in Studio Art from Wesleyan University. Erin is a Teaching Fellow at Harvard Medical School, an Associate Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, and an Affiliate of The Galileo Project at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
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 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.
Moshe Levy
Moshe Levy is our AI advisor. As such, he is responsible for our software development and for managing our software engineers in their development projects. He reports to our President and Chief Science Officer. Mr. Levy received a Bachelor of Science with a major in Physics and a Minor in Mathematics in 2021, from Rutgers University, and a Master of Science in Physics in 2023 from Hebrew University in Israel. During his studies, and afterwards, Mr. Levy has developed AI/ML software models for use in science and research applications as an independent contractor. Mr. Levy is currently working for us as an independent contractor, while also working as a programmer for select software companies. With increased funding, Mr. Levy plans to join our company as a full time employee.
SCIENTIFIC BOARD
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.
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.
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.
BOARD OF ADVISORS
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
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
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
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.
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.