Guest post by National Library of Medicine staff.
NLM is excited to announce that long-time leader and innovator, Stephen Sherry, PhD, is now our Acting Director. Dr. Sherry has 25 years of experience performing research, education, and data resource management involving human variation, genetics, and genomics. His tenure follows that of Patricia Flatley Brennan, RN, PhD, who retired from federal service on September 30 after seven years of service as our director.
Dr. Sherry brings a history of innovation and leadership to NLM. His vision to advance NLM’s mission includes enhancing health and research through robust, sustainable information resources and transformative information science, engineering, and technology development, all while leading in engineering excellence for resilience, reliability, and representation in the era of artificial intelligence.
Most recently, he served as Director of NLM’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and Associate Director for Scientific Data Resources. In his role as the Director of NCBI, he implemented his vision of customer engagement and modular, interoperable, and cloud-based approaches to the technical platforms for NLM’s products and services, as well as the One NLM concept. He was recognized for his inventiveness in leveraging research for the COVID-19 public health emergency response. Dr. Sherry spearheaded key innovations at NLM, including the ClincalTrials.gov modernization effort and the development of the NIH Comparative Genomics Resource, and ensured public input and technical innovation while they were developed. He positioned NCBI as a strong collaborative force across NIH and in support of major NLM projects, including the NIH Preprint Pilot for rapid access to NIH-funded research and the MEDLINE 2022 Initiative, which resulted in entirely automated indexing of the biomedical literature available through NLM’s PubMed and PubMed Central.
Throughout his tenure at NLM, Dr. Sherry participated in many NIH efforts to characterize human genetic diversity and has served on numerous working groups across NIH to address a range of data science issues, including the development of the genomic data sharing policy, privacy analysis for risk-sensitive data sets, and advances in scientific publications.
Dr. Sherry earned his PhD in Anthropology at the Pennsylvania State University in 1996 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Louisiana State University Medical Center prior to joining NLM in 1998.
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