Born in California, Richard obtained a PhD in Molecular Biology at the University of Colorado, followed by an NIH fellowship in Cambridge where he conducted the world's first field release of a transgenic food crop, and created and distributed amongst the most widely cited and licensed enabling technologies in the life sciences. After working with the FAO of the United Nations as Senior Molecular Biologist he founded Cambia in Canberra in 1991. 

Cambia is an autonomous international non-profit institute that creates new technologies, tools and paradigms to bring efficiency and equity to life-sciences enabled innovation.   The Cambia BiOS Initiative (www.bios.net) - the biological open source movement - is an integrated response to increasing science and technology complexity, patent thickets and innovation system inefficiencies. The BiOS Initiative created the first patent-based commons mechanism for science-enabled innovation, and has been the trendsetter in new thinking about patents, collaboraton and public good. As part of this work, Cambia created the Patent Lens, (www.patentlens.net), now the pre-eminent independent public, global open access resource for increasing patent transparency.

Richard has worked and taught extensively worldwide, supporting the Rockefeller Foundation's biotechnology network for over a decade, and has been an advisor to many UN Agencies.   He has been profiled in media including The Economist, Newsweek, Nature Biotechnology, Science, New Scientist, Wired, and Red Herring.

Cambia's work has recently featured in cover editorials in many major life sciences journals. In 2003 he was named by Scientific American to the List of the World's 50 most influential technologists, cited as the World Research Leader for 2003 for Economic Development. In 2005 Richard was awarded the Leadership in Science: Public Service Award by the American Society of Plant Biologists. Richard is an Outstanding Social Entrepreneur of the Schwab Foundation, for which he is a regular panelist at the Davos meetings of the World Economic Forum. In 2009, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Richard became Professor of Science, Technology & Law at the Queensland University of Technology, and Founding Director of the Initiative for Open Innovation (IOI).

View full Curriculum Vitae (info).

Carol holds a Ph.D. in Genetics from Stanford University and a J.D. magna cum laude from University of Puget Sound (now Seattle University) School of Law. She was a biomedical scientist in the academic world for many years before earning her law degree. Her legal focus is patents and their strategic integration with business goals. In private law practice, she often counselled clients on freedom to operate issues and saw the need for more pragmatic learning tools about patents.  Carol was the Director of Intellectual Property and Chief Legal Officer for Cambia until 2004 and oversaw the creation of the Cambia IP Resource. She has now returned to private practice (www.cougarlaw.com) and is retained as a consultant for Cambia.

Doug is a foundation member of the Informatics Team, joining in early 2000. Doug's roles include working on the development of the patent database and on the Cambia IP website content management and interface. Doug previously worked in the public sector (IP Australia) in the area of intellectual property information management, which he interspersed with extensive travelling throughout Asia. He graduated from the University of Melbourne with a BA majoring in computing.

Neil is from Hamilton, New Zealand, where he caught a B.Sc (Phys) at Waikato Uni.  He did a short stint of seismic surveying in the Bass Strait with Esso and enjoyed a few stormy days of seas rougher than he imagined possible. He worked at the CSIRO Division of Fossil Fuels and did a part-time M.Sc. (Phys) at the UNSW. Since then he's been doing IT work, initially embedded engineering applications and telecommunications and finally more general IT, in the UK, NZ, Belgium and Australia. Neil moved back to Australia from Belgium to be warm and live near a nice surf beach, but something went wrong with the plan and he ended up in Canberra - oh well, it's great for cycling. Neil has worked extensively on Cambia Sequence Software

Paul is an experienced Java developer having spent nine years in the industry in Australia and The Netherlands. He has a strong focus on sustainable software development through agile methodologies and continuous tool refinement without losing sight of project goals. Located in Brisbane, Paul works on open source projects in the stolen moments he calls "spare time" and has a Bachelors Degree in Mechanical Engineering.

Peter has joined Cambia as a graphic and website designer. He has recently returned to Brisbane after spending several years living and working in the UK. Peter has a strong focus on website usability and interaction design with 10 years commercial experience as a website designer. He graduated from Griffith University with a Bachelor of Multimedia and also completed a Bachelor of Science at the University of Queensland.

Josh is an Adelaide boy with a BSc in Computer Science and an Honours degree in Philosophy, perfectly reflecting his passion for truth, logic, beauty and a damn good argument. He has worked in the IT industry for more than a decade, in both the commercial sector and academia. He joined Cambia in 2006 as a Java Developer. When not debugging code, Josh loves buzzing around the National Capital on his venerable Vespa.    

Originally from Sydney, Peter moved to Canberra in 2006 to see what a real winter is like. In a previous life he studied computer science at the University of New South Wales and wrote software.

Andrae is an experienced Software Engineer with an extensive background in the engineering aspects of Information Management. He has worked on metadata management for such diverse fields as Oil and Gas Exploration, Telecommunications Network Management, Records Management, and The Semantic Web. He has been an active member of the Open-Source community for the past 14 years, with a corresponding interest in the development of modern intellectual property law. An unapologetic geek — a spare moment is enjoyed, reading old books, studying the semantics of programming languages, and playing board games.