Prachee Avasthi, PhD

Primary Affiliations and Expertise

I’m a co-founder and the Chief Scientific Officer at a science company in Berkeley, CA, Arcadia Science. I was most recently an Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Dartmouth‘s Geisel School of Medicine where I ran an academic lab (you can find past blog posts there). My academic research was largely in the field of Cell Biology and I spent most of my career studying the cytoskeleton, intracellular trafficking, and the biogenesis of an antenna-like structure found on nearly all cells called the cilium. Most of this work was done in a small green alga called Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. 

Open Science

One of my passions is open science and I’ve held a number of different roles in this vein. I am currently the Head of Open Science at  Astera Institute, where I lead efforts to catalyze transformative change in research communication and knowledge exchange. I am the former President of the Board of Directors at ASAPbio, a non-profit working to promote innovations in life science communication. I am also former director and chair of the Board of Directors at eLife, an open access journal-turned preprint review service.  I am a member of Incentivizing Collaborative and Open Research (ICOR) team that tries to take a data driven approach open research interventions. As a strong advocate of author-driven publishing, I am a BioRxiv affiliate. And  finally, at Arcadia Science, one of my primary responsibilities, besides overseeing scientific strategy, is designing our own publishing experiment to maximize the utility, impact, and efficiency of the research done at Arcadia. I hope that others learn and iterate on our efforts to push the boundaries of open science in their own labs, companies, and organizations to maximally advance knowledge for society.

The past and Education

Before moving my academic laboratory to Dartmouth in New Hampshire’s Upper Valley, I started my first lab at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, KS. I was there from 2015-2020 and earned tenure in the department of Anatomy and Cell Biology. Beyond my interests in open science, I spent much of my academic life also trying to reform research practices, serving on a policy and cultural reform organization called Rescuing Biomedical Research and starting a global network for thousands of new faculty called New PI Slack.

My bachelor’s degree was in Molecular and Integrative Physiology at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. My PhD was in Neuroscience at the University of Utah studying trafficking in photoreceptors in mice (with Wolfgang Baehr). I did my postdoctoral work at the University of California San Francisco where I first fell in love with Chlamydomonas as a powerful model system to rapidly and mechanistically investigate the control mechanisms regulating cilia (in the lab of Wallace Marshall). As you can now see, I’ve lived in every time zone in the contiguous US (but think PT or MT is probably best for sports-see below).

Hobbies and Vibes

I love sports (NFL>>most others, but I’ll watch anything ), exercise (running), and a fancy meal or cocktail. My favorite type of vacation is unquestionably 1-2 days in Vegas. I live with my husband and 10 yo son in Northern CA, grew up Chicago where I still have family, and was born in India. 

For more detail than anyone wants or needs, see my catalog of minutiae, aka my mostly up-to-date CV.