About — Philip Rubin

My Career: Science, Research, Policy, and Ethics

White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)

In February 2012, I took a position as the Assistant Director for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in the Executive Office of the President of the United States. I also served as a Senior Advisor at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) directorate. At OSTP I led the White House's neuroscience initiative. On April 16, 2012, then Congressman Chakah Fattah (D-PA) introduced House Resolution 613, supporting the OSTP interagency working group on neuroscience that Rubin organized. The resolution also "... commends President Barack Obama for the expeditious appointment of Dr. Philip Rubin to lead the working group's efforts." In June 2012, I was named by John Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of OSTP, to be OSTP's Principal Assistant Director for Science, taking over the duties of Nobel laureate Carl Wieman, who resigned as Associate Director for Science on June 2. In this new role I also became Co-Chair of the National Science and Technology Council's Committee on Science, serving with other Co-Chairs, Francis Collins and Subra Suresh, Directors of the NIH and NSF, respectively. I also co-chaired the interagency Common Rule Modernization Working Group.

During my tenure, key priorities for the OSTP Science Division included:

Support for fundamental and translational research at NIH, NSF, DOE, NIST, NASA, and other federal agencies.
Public access to research results, open data, and open science (led by Michael Stebbins, who is now Chief of Staff at ASCO CancerLinQ).
Large-scale, scientific infrastructure (led by Gerald Blazey, now Vice President for Research and Innovation Partnerships at Northern Illinois University; Altaf Carim, now at the Dept. of Energy, Office of Science; and Tamara Dickinson, now Founder and President of Science Matters Consulting), including such projects as ITER and the James Webb Space Telescope.
Biomedical innovation (led by Michael Stebbins and Col. Geoffrey Ling, both of whom when on to propose "Creating the Health Advanced Research Projects Agency (HARPA)" for the Day One Project, which led to ARPA-H; Ling is the Founder and CEO of On Demand Pharmaceuticals).
Neuroscience (led by Rubin and Carlos Peña, with contributions by Danielle Carnival, Meredith Drossback, Tom Kalil, Kumar Garg, Michael Stebbins, Carl Wieman, and others), including areas such as traumatic brain injury, neurodegenerative disease, the BRAIN Initiative, cognitive science, development, emotion, and learning, and the chartering of the NSTC Interagency Working Group on Neuroscience (IWGN). Rubin represented the White House at the G8 Dementia Summit on December 11, 2013 in London, held to shape an effective international response to dementia. (Carlos Peña is now the Chief Regulatory Office at the Jacobs Institute; Danielle Carnival currently serves as White House Cancer Moonshot Coordinator in OSTP; Meredith Drossback is Deputy Director for Science at SciLine at AAAS.)
Mental health, including areas such as PTSD, stigma, and suicide. On Aug. 31, 2012, President Obama issued an Executive Order “Improving Access to Mental Health Services for Veterans, Service Members, and Military Families”. On June 3, 2013, President Obama and Vice President Biden hosted a National Conference on Mental Health at the White House as part of the Administration’s effort to launch a national conversation to increase understanding and awareness about mental health. (Rubin and Stebbins)
Forensic science, including working with the Department of Justice and NIST to help establish the National Commission on Forensic Science as a Federal Advisory Committee. It existed from 2013 until April 23, 2017, when its charter expired. (Tania Simoncelli, now Vice President of Science in Society at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative; Rick Weiss, now Director of SciLine; and Rubin).
Behavioral science and social science. On May 22, 2013, a White House workshop on “Psychological Science and Behavioral Economics in the Service of Public Policy” and was held, followed by related intergovernmental meetings. The initial planning meeting was originally proposed by Richard Suzman (then at NIH/NIA), and subsequently organized and supported by Philip NIH/NIA, Rubin and Tom Kalil of OSTP, Alan Krueger (then head of the Council of Economic Advisers), and Alan Kraut (then Executive Director of the Association for Psychological Science). Influenced by the “nudge” approach and work of the UK Behavioural Insights Team led by David Halpern, it resulted in the OSTP behavioral impacts program (directed by Maya Shankar under the supervision of Rubin and Tom Kalil). In September, 2015, this became the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST) established by Executive Order #13707. The General Services Administration (GSA) coordinated ongoing activities. In addition, a separate NSTC Subcommittee on Social and Behavioral Sciences was re-chartered in 2011. It was originally established in 2004 and again rechartered in 2015. At various times during my tenure at OSTP, it was co-chaired by: Fay Lomax Cook, then Assistant Director of SBE at NSF, where I was also one of her senior advisors; Bill Riley, then Director of OBSSR at NIH; Robert Kaplan, then Chief Science Officer at AHRQ; and Kei Koizumi of OSTP.
Broadening participation in science (led by Joan Frye, now retired; Sean Jones, now Assistant Director for Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the NSF; and Danielle Carnival).
Human subjects research issues (led by Rubin and Tania Simoncelli), including modernization of the Common Rule.
Uniform Guidance for research and related regulations; grant reform; and graduate education reform (led by Joan Frye, Kelsey Cook, and Sean Jones, all at various times at NSF).
Language and communication, (led by Philip Rubin), including the chartering of an interagency NSTC working group.
Aging, including interfacing with the White House Conference on Aging and with PCAST activities on technology and aging (Rubin).
Space science (Tamara Dickinson, then principal assistant director for Energy and Environment at OSTP; Rubin).
During this time period, many other activities were part of the Science Division’s portfolio in coordination with other OSTP divisions and programs, PCAST, and NSTC committees and working groups. Some of these areas included: citizen science (Kalil, Rubin, Jenn Gustetic, Lea Shanley, Dave Wilkinson, and others); antibiotic resistance, pollinator health, improving scientific reproducibility and integrity, improving the regulatory system for biotechnology products, and the management of scientific collections (Stebbins, Holdren, Peña, Rubin, Howard Shelanski, and others); assessment and monitoring of critical minerals and rare earth elements (Blazey, Carim, Dickinson, Holdren, and others); etc.
In February 2015, I retired from OSTP and the NSF..