Michael Stebbins is the President of Science Advisors, a science and health consulting firm he founded in 2018. He served as the Assistant Director for Biotechnology in the Obama White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and is the principal driver of the creation of ARPA-H.
While at the White House, Dr. Stebbins developed eight Executive Orders and other Federal directives addressing issues including the antibiotic resistance crisis, restoration of pollinator health, the purchasing of bio-based products, improving veterans’ mental health, increasing access to federally funded scientific research publications and data, evaluating and addressing the preferential purchasing of antibiotic free meats, reforming the regulatory system for biotechnology products, and improving the management of scientific collections. He was a leader in the White House on driving a case to the Supreme Court on the patenting of genes and was the White House staff lead on recommendations to the President on drug innovation and antibiotic resistance reports developed by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Dr. Stebbins served as a science advisor to the Obama and Biden Presidential campaigns and on the Obama White House Transition Team. He worked for U.S. Senator Harry Reid as the lead on embryonic stem cells that forced President Bush’s first veto. He is the former Vice President of Science and Technology for the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, and director of biology policy for the Federation of American Scientists. Before coming to Washington, he was a senior editor at Nature Genetics. He received his Ph.D. in genetics while working at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. There he developed systems for spatially and temporally controlling the expression of genes in animals and created the first monoclonal antibody against luciferase, which is found in research kits used around the world today. Collections from his field research in Madagascar can be found in four museums including the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. He is the Chair of the Board for Vivli and the MIT Knowledge Futures Group and serves on the advisory boards for 5 companies.
