DENISE CARUSO (Founder, Executive Director)

Caruso has served as the executive director of the nonprofit Hybrid Vigor Institute since it was founded in February 2000, and is the editor of hybridvigor.net, the Institute’s blog. In December 2006, she published her first book, on risk, public policy and biotechnology, Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet, that won a Silver Medal in the Science category of the 2007 Independent Publisher Book Awards, and was on the Best Business Books of 2007 list published by Strategy + Business Magazine.

During 2007, Caruso also wrote the Re:framing column for the Sunday Business section of The New York Times. She continues to work on projects both in academia and the private sector to improve the methods for analyzing the risks of science and technology-related innovations. Her current interests are focused on synthetic biology and new methods for analyzing and mitigating the risks of global infectious disease, especially animal-borne, zoonotic diseases.

Caruso’s work on critical thinking and decision making is supported by The Whitman Institute. She works closely with Baruch Fischhoff, a well known risk expert and professor in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University.

She has convened or co-hosted meetings of faculty and investigators for these projects that include world-class natural and social scientists and decision analysts from some of the nation’s most prestigious institutions. Case studies have included the risks of xenotransplantation using genetically modified pigs and the risks of pandemic avian influenza, a project funded by the National Science Foundation (SES 0350493), where she served as co-investigator with CMU’s Fischhoff.

Along with several schools of public health and corporate sponsors, Hybrid Vigor co-hosted the Pandefense 1.0 meeting in November 2005, which was convened by epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, M.D. (now executive director of the Google Foundation) and the Global Business Network, of which she is a member, with the goal of reducing the probability and effects of an influenza pandemic.

She is an affiliated researcher at the Center for Risk Perception and Communication at Carnegie Mellon University, a member of the Global Business Network, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Molecular Sciences Institute and the Independent Media Institute, and is a director emerita of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She serves on the advisory boards of SustainAbility and Public Knowledge.

Caruso’s perspectives on risk were featured in the Spring 2008 issue of Strategy + Business magazine, and in an article commissioned by Harvard Business Review, included in the “HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas for 2005″ issue, published in February of that year. She also was co-editor of a Special Report in HBR’s May 2006 Forethought section, called “Preparing for a Pandemic.”

A veteran journalist and analyst with more than 15 years experience observing the industries of digital technology and interactive media, Caruso is known for her pioneering role as a commentator and analyst in the emerging digital media industry as the founding editor of the Digital Media newsletter in 1991. She wrote the Technology column for the Monday Information Industries section of The New York Times from 1995 until founding Hybrid Vigor in 2000.

She was an early advocate of First Amendment rights online, and one of the first journalists to focus on the intersection of technology, commerce and culture. She holds a bachelors’ degree in English from California Polytechnic State University.

KATHERINE FULTON (Board Secretary)

Fulton is a senior advisor at Global Business Network, a partner of the Monitor Group and president of the Monitor Institute, the vehicle through which the Group applies its knowledge, expertise, skill, and capital to complex social problem solving. During much of the past decade at GBN, she helped organizations in more than 12 industries manage more skillfully through increasing uncertainty. She has also served as co-head of GBN’s consulting practice..

In recent years, Fulton’s consulting practice has focused on the future of philanthropy and nonprofits, and she has given more than three dozen major speeches on the subject, including one at the prestigious TED Conference. She is the co-author of two publications on philanthropy published in 2005, Looking Out for the Future: An Orientation for Twenty-First Century Philanthropists and On the Brink of New Promise: The Future of U.S. Community Foundations. She also co-authored the 2004 publication, What If? The Art of Scenario Thinking for Nonprofits.

In a varied career that has included organizational consulting, journalism, and teaching and volunteer service, she has pursued her passionate interests in the use of private resources for public purposes and the connection between leadership and learning.

Before joining GBN, Fulton spent more than three years based at Harvard and Duke Universities. At Harvard, as a recipient of a Nieman Fellowship for journalists, she deepened her interests in organizations, new media, and pluralism, and organized two major national conferences on the future of journalism. At Duke, she developed new courses on the future of leadership and organizations, the future of communications media, and the future of democracy. Her innovative teaching was featured in Time magazine.
Her efforts have won her both a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University and a Lyndhurst Foundation prize for community service.

RICHARD MILLER (Board Treasurer)

Miller, a pioneer in the design and implementation of electronic messaging and group communication, is the CEO of the Silicon Valley-based networking company Replicate Technologies. He began his career at the nonprofit Institute For The Future as a researcher for the U.S. Government’s renowned Advanced Research Projects Agency. Here he participated in some of the earliest technical design and development of computer based messaging (today’s ubiquitous “e-mail”) and computer conferencing using the distributed data network called ARPAnet, the precursor to today’s Internet.

Miller then co-founded Infomedia Corporation, where he was responsible for development and operations of Infomedia’s computer messaging, conferencing and information services, and later Telematica, Inc., a venture consultancy specializing in electronic messaging. As VP of Communications Technology and VP of Business Development for General Magic, he directed technology and commercial strategy for the pioneering startup.

After almost ten years running the venture consultancies Telematica, Inc. and Breo Consulting LLC, Miller co-founded Univa Corporation, an Illinois-based open-source software company where he served as COO for two years until leaving to assume the CEO role at Safe Data Sharing Inc., a Silicon Valley software company providing technology that permits use of sensitive information (such as personally identifying information) without risk of privacy breach.

OLIVER MORTON (Founding Fellow)

Morton, a Hybrid Vigor Fellow since its founding in 2000, is currently the chief news and features editor at the London-based scientific journal Nature. He took a degree in the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University in the mid 1980s, after which he served for several years as special features editor and science and technology editor at The Economist.

Since 1997, he has been writing about scientific knowledge, technological change and their effects for a wide range of publications. He has been a contributing editor at WIRED and a contributing author to the New Yorker, Discover, Newsweek International, and Talk; to the journals Nature and Science; to the newspapers The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal; and, to the magazines New Scientist and Prospect. In 2001, he worked as a writer and editor on Improving Health Outcomes for the Poor, a report prepared for the World Health Organization’s Commission on Macroeconomics and Health.

Morton also was managing editor of The Daily Davos, a Newsweek website covering the World Economic Forum annual meeting, as well serving a brief stint as the editor-in-chief of Wired UK. Author of the widely acclaimed Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination, and the Birth of a World (St. Martin’s Press, 2002), his most recent book, Eating the Sun: How Light Powers the Planet, will be released in the U.S. in 2008. He is a consultant to the Near Earth Object working group of the International Astronomical Union, and a member of the World Technology Network.

DIANA RHOTEN, PH.D. (Co-founder, Fellow)

Rhoten was appointed a Hybrid Vigor Fellow in June 2003 after co-founding the Institute and serving as its research director. She joined the Social Science Research Council in January 2004 as founder of a new program area called Knowledge Institutions. She is presently on sabbatical at the National Science Foundation, where she is a founding program director in the Office of Cyberinfrastructure. While at Hybrid Vigor, she served as lead principal investigator for Hybrid Vigor’s NSF-funded pilot study on interdisciplinary research networks and methods, completed in June 2003.

In addition to her research and publications on interdisciplinary research, Rhoten works with various academic and non-academic organizations on the design, implementation, and assessment of new forms of collaboration, work, and training. In this context, she is particularly interested in the implications that current trends in social and natural science research pose for traditional institutions as they confront contemporaneous societal and market issues. For her work in this area, Rhoten was selected as a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer (July 2005-June 2007), an award that honors individuals at the leading edge of science.

Rhoten has a Ph.D. in Social Sciences, Policy, and Educational Practice and an M.A. in Sociology and Organizational Studies from Stanford University, as well as an M.Ed. in International Development Education from Harvard University. Her unique interdisciplinary approach has been funded by grants from the Fulbright Commission, the Stanford University Center for Latin American Studies, and the Stanford University Lieberman Fellowship Committee.