Adam Bly

Adam Bly

Founder and CEO, Seed (New York, NY); Visiting Senior Fellow, Science, Technology & Society, Harvard Kennedy School of Government (Cambridge, MA)

August 28, 2014

Adam Bly is the Founder and CEO of Seed and Chairman of the Seed Institute.

Mr. Bly began his career in science at the age of 16 as the youngest guest researcher at the National Research Council of Canada, where he spent three years studying the biochemistry of cancer. Out of the lab, he founded Seed magazine in 2001 and served as its Editor-in-Chief. Under his leadership, the magazine – tag-lined “Science is CultureTM” – earned critical acclaim for modernizing scientific publishing and bridging long-standing divides between science and society, from art and design to politics and religion. In 2006, he founded ScienceBlogs.com, the first science blogging network, and in 2010, he founded Visualizing.org, the first online platform for sharing data visualization. In 2012, he formed Seed Scientific to provide advanced data solutions to companies and governments around the world in the interest of spreading scientific thinking.

Mr. Bly has lectured around the world on the future of science and its role in society, including at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, the Royal Society in the United Kingdom, the Ministry of Science and Technology in China, the STS Forum in Japan, and the National Academies of Science, the State Department, the House of Representatives, the National Institutes of Health, and NASA in the United States, as well as at Harvard University, MIT, McGill University, and Peking University, to name just a few.

He served as Vice Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Design Innovation, and now serves as Vice Chair of the Global Agenda Council on Complex Systems.

He was also a Partner to the Executive Coordinator’s Office of Rio+20, the UN Conference on Sustainable Development. He is the editor of Science is Culture: Conversations at the New Intersection of Science + Society (HarperCollins), which has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Mr. Bly was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and is a recipient of the Golden Jubilee Medal from Queen Elizabeth II.


Role: Panel Member
Report: Science Culture: Where Canada Stands (August 2014)