Jason Hoyt, PhD

Jason Hoyt is Vice-President, Research & Development and Chief Scientist at Mendeley. He holds a PhD in Genetics from Stanford University where he was awarded the Ruth L. Kirschstein NIH predoctoral fellowship from 2002-2007.

He is involved at the executive level in all business and technical strategies at Mendeley. He established and oversees the API, search, statistics, and recommendation platforms. Additionally, he and the data mining team are responsible for content acquisition, content cleaning, and deduplicating more than 100 million documents to create the world's largest crowdsourced academic database. He has been awarded several major UK and European grants to investigate new data mining techniques and establish a pilot program with the University of Cambridge to integrate Mendeley with institutional repositories.

Unlike many knowledge gatekeepers in the academic publishing industry, he seeks to make science more transparent and collaborative. To advance science, knowledge needs to be easily accesible and reusable. Each of Mendeley's services and products adhere to this personal objective.

While at Stanford and prior to Mendeley, Jason saw the need for improved collaborative research through modern Internet technologies. This resulted in founding Ologeez, a peer-review literature search, recommendation engine and group collaboration for academics and industry professionals. It has been featured on TechCrunch and recognized world-wide by academics as one of the first attempts at "Research 2.0."

Also at Stanford he worked under Michele Calos researching human gene therapy. He developed new methods for non-viral gene delivery into mouse hematopoietic cells using the phiC31 integrase. Additionally, he used directed evolution to evolve phiC31, such that integration would occur at single, defined locations in the human genome, thus reducing potential side-effects. Also amongst his direct research advisors at Stanford were Gavin Sherlock, Anne Brunet, and Andrew Fire: 2006 Nobel Laureate in Medicine or Physiology.

His first programming experience: Circa 1981 at the age of five with his family's Atari 800 packing a whopping 8KB of memory and the BASIC language.

In his free time you’ll probably catch him at a small indie rock venue, daydreaming about a rock-and-roll life.