Dr. Stephen Friend is a world leader in efforts to make large scale, data-intensive biology more openly accessible to citizens and the entire research community in order to accelerate scientific progress. He began using large datasets and integrative system biology approaches to complex diseases in the mid-1990s, and has taken his efforts from medicine to academia to biotechnology to big pharmaceutical companies. Dr. Friend is currently the President of Sage Bionetworks whose mission is to redefine how complex biological data is gathered, shared and used, by redefining it through open systems, incentives and norms.