Press & Bio

Dr. Martin Etzrodt is Founding Director of the Open Science Institute in Interlaken, Switzerland. Trained as a stem-cell biologist with a PhD from Harvard / Université de Lausanne and postdoctoral work at ETH Zürich, he helped coin the term decentralised science (DeSci) during his years as Principal Researcher at the AKASHA Foundation. He also sits on the board of the ISCC Foundation, steward of the ISO 24138 standard for content identification.

Dr. Martin Etzrodt is Founding Director of the Open Science Institute in Interlaken, Switzerland, where he leads research, development, and the build-out of open scientific infrastructure on behalf of the Open Science Foundation. He earned his PhD in Cancer and Immunology (2012) through a joint program of Harvard Medical School / Massachusetts General Hospital and the Université de Lausanne, and completed postdoctoral training at the Helmholtz Zentrum München and at ETH Zürich's Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering. He identified TNF as a key cytokine regulating PU.1 in haematopoietic stem cells, and his scientific work has appeared in Science, Nature, Blood, Cell Reports, PNAS, and Cell Stem Cell. From 2018 he served as Principal Researcher at the AKASHA Foundation in Zug, working with the co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain on Web3 technologies for science and helping coin the term decentralised science (DeSci). He is a long-standing contributor to the Blockchain for Science think-tank and sits on the boards of the ISCC Foundation (steward of ISO 24138) and the Kinderabenteuerhof Freiburg e.V.

Dr. Martin Etzrodt is Founding Director of the Open Science Institute in Interlaken, Switzerland, where he leads research, development, and the build-out of open scientific infrastructure on behalf of the Open Science Foundation (opening.science). A German scientist by training, he combines more than a decade of laboratory research in stem cell biology, immunology, and single-cell systems with a parallel record as one of the early figures in decentralised science (DeSci).

He earned his PhD in Cancer and Immunology (2012) through a joint program of Harvard Medical School / Massachusetts General Hospital and the Université de Lausanne, with thesis work on the endogenous and exogenous regulation of monocyte responses. He completed postdoctoral training at the Helmholtz Zentrum München and at ETH Zürich's Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, where he identified TNF as a key cytokine regulating the transcription factor PU.1 in haematopoietic stem cells and established the laboratory's single-cell microfluidics platform. His scientific work has appeared in Science, Nature, Blood, Cell Reports, PNAS, Immunity, and Cell Stem Cell; he has an h-index of 24 and over 8,000 citations.

From 2018 he served as Principal Researcher at the AKASHA Foundation in Zug, working with the co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain on Web3 technologies for science and on economic models for scientific communication, attribution, and funding. During this period he helped coin the term decentralised science (DeSci) and became a long-standing contributor to the Blockchain for Science think-tank founded by Sönke Bartling. His writing on the topic has appeared in Frontiers in Blockchain and Elephant in the Lab, and he has been an invited speaker at venues including the MIT Media Lab Cryptoeconomic Systems Summit and CERN Idea Square.

Recognitions include the EMBO Long-Term Postdoctoral Fellowship, the AACR Centennial Predoctoral Fellowship, the Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds PhD Fellowship, and an ETH Career Seed Grant. As a high-school student in 2002, he won first prize at the European Union Contest for Young Scientists in Vienna and at the German national Jugend forscht competition for research on slime moulds as bioassays.

Alongside his work at the Open Science Institute, Dr. Etzrodt sits on the board of the ISCC Foundation, steward of ISO 24138, the international standard for content identification, and on the board of the Kinderabenteuerhof Freiburg e.V., a community initiative providing adventure-based outdoor experiences for children.