Simons Foundation Names Boyana Konforti Director of Education & Outreach

 

Boyana Konforti has been named director of Education & Outreach for the Simons Foundation.

 

In her new role, Konforti will build and lead an expanding program initiative designed to enrich public understanding of science and mathematics.

 

Konforti comes to her post with broad and extensive experience communicating life science to audiences both lay and scientific, as well as a longstanding interest in public education and outreach. An experienced scientific editor, writer and speaker who has launched and led publications at both Cell and Nature publishing groups, Konforti contributed broadly at both publications, providing strategic and editorial leadership, forming strategic partnerships and collaborations, and evolving their offerings, particularly online. Konforti has fostered relationships across diverse scientific communities that cover the entire spectrum of life science. She coauthored a textbook, The Molecules of Life: Physical and Chemical Principles, published in July 2012 by Garland Science/Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, that is currently being used at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

 

As launch editor at Cell Reports, Konforti positioned and oversaw that publication’s launch and rapid growth into the successful journal it is today. She established and maintained a strong Web presence for Cell Reports on Twitter and via The Cell Reporter blog. Before her work at Cell Reports, Konforti served for seven years as chief editor at Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, where she designed and implemented its relaunch from its previous incarnation as Nature Structural Biology. She wrote extensively for that publication, contributing editorials and writing research highlights.

 

Before her career as an editor, Konforti completed two postdoctoral degrees in New York, one with Anna Pyle at Columbia University, and the other with Magda Konarska at Rockefeller University, where she studied the mechanisms of RNA splicing. She has authored 13 scientific papers.

 

Konforti received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Stanford University in California, where she studied the mechanism of DNA recombination, and a B.A. from York University in Toronto, Canada.