Kristine Willis

Project focus: The Fellow will co-develop an initiative to explore how scientific communities identify, support, and advance ideas with the potential to transform the physical sciences.     

Having both received and administered awards from the National Institutes of Health, Kristine Willis has a unique perspective on science funding. During more than a decade as a program director, she represented the agency on several high-profile initiatives to improve rigor and reproducibility in science, oversaw an innovative alternative to traditional project-based funding that supports the full program of research in the laboratory of early-career researchers, and managed roughly $30 million annually in studies focused on DNA damage and cancer metabolism. She also applied her skills as a systems biologist and data scientist to analyze the grant-making process, authoring papers that show the influence of topic choice on the competition for awards and that the NIH portfolio has been slowly but continuously trending toward more clinical and translational science for the past 30 years. Her most recent work describes an approach to predicting transformational breakthroughs in biomedical science. As the founder of the nonprofit Woodley Park Institute, she seeks to translate her experience and insights into evidence-based strategies for improving how scientific research is supported and evaluated, so that more people can enjoy its benefits.