People
Board
Mihai Alisie
Founder
Co-founder of Ethereum and of Bitcoin Magazine, the first publication dedicated to Bitcoin, which he started with Vitalik Buterin in 2011 and edited until 2013. He led the Swiss legal and business setup for the Ethereum pre-sale and served as Vice-President of the Ethereum Foundation until 2015. He now works on strengthening open source and on Etherlaken, a regenerative living lab in the Bernese Oberland.
Herbert Sterchi
Board Member
Swiss IT and blockchain executive with more than 30 years in finance, operations, and business growth. One of the original Crypto Valley pioneers, he was the local Swiss director who helped operationalise the Ethereum Foundation when it settled in Zug in 2014. Previously COO and CFO at Thomson Reuters Global Resources; today Managing Director of Codex Execution in Zug.
David Kalberer
Board Member
International financial services executive with more than 30 years of experience in banking, capital markets, investment management, and corporate governance. His career includes senior roles at a major Swiss bank, an international energy group, and a major family office, including private-equity board positions. He co-founded and leads digital-asset infrastructure provider Ovryde Ltd. He holds law degrees from the University of Zurich and UCLA and is admitted to the Swiss and New York Bars.
Scientific Advisory Board
To be announced soon.
Scientific Leadership
Martin Etzrodt
Director Open Science Institute
Martin Etzrodt is the Founding Director of the Open Science Institute. He holds a PhD in cancer research and immunology from the Université de Lausanne, with doctoral research conducted at Harvard Medical School, and completed his postdoctoral research at ETH Zürich. As an early pioneer of blockchain applications in science, he helped coin the term decentralised science.
Robin Wilkening
Program lead Open Health
Program lead of the Open Health initiative, home to the Open Twin Lab and the Open Twin Hub at the Etherlaken campus. As epidemiologist, he took his doctorate & habilitation at the University of Greifswald and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Framingham Heart Study, Boston University. Appointed one of Germany’s youngest professors in 2014, he is Adjunct Professor at Monash University with a focus on global health and digital medicine.
Philip Dettinger
Program lead Open Hardware
Program lead of the Open Hardware initiative and a cell biologist by training. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley and at ETH Zürich, where he developed microfluidic devices for haematopoietic stem cell culture and live imaging. He has since worked in translational and industrial research in Basel: automated bioreactors and a 3D bioprinter for engineered tissue at University Hospital Basel, and on-chip continuous flow modules for artificial vasculature at Roche, where his work produced four patents.
Fellows
Peter Dike
Fellow
Software engineer and tech entrepreneur working on AI, digitalisation, and open science, with a focus on building impactful, sustainable solutions that push innovation forward. He is the first fellow of the Open Science Foundation, where he contributes to the OpenTwin initiative, and is moving into a PhD in medical image analysis at the University of Bern on clinical generative AI for cancer imaging.
Early-phase advisors & origins
Sönke Bartling
Early-phase advisor
Sönke Bartling advised the foundation in its early phase. A board-certified radiologist and medical imaging researcher, he co-edited the 2014 book Opening Science (opens in a new tab) (Bartling & Friesike, eds., Springer, 2014), which gave this domain its name, and founded Blockchain for Science in Berlin. He combined Blockchain and Science and published the first academic work on blockchain and science (opens in a new tab).
Gotthold Fläschner
Early-phase advisor
Gotthold Fläschner advised the foundation in its early phase. A physicist, he built a scale precise enough to weigh a single living cell. The work was done in the Biophysics group at ETH Zürich, published in Nature in 2017, and recognised with the ETH medal and the Swiss NanoTech Award. He now leads an independent group at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) in Barcelona.
Design & visual arts
We would like to acknowledge the artists behind our founding website.
Scientific Knowledge as a Global Commons
Under this title, the Basel-based visual artist Martin Golombek (opens in a new tab) created the foundation's visual identity. At its heart is the animated logo, which embodies an open and continuous process, the way this foundation understands science itself.
The identity was realized, and the website's graphic design developed, by Tom Walsh (opens in a new tab), the designer behind Prolog, a design studio in Basel, Switzerland.