Decentralizing Discovery: Lara Mangravite and the Mission of Digitalis Commons

In this episode of BioTalk, Lara Mangravite, PhD, Executive Director of Digitalis Commons, joins the conversation to explore how scientific research is shifting in the U.S.—from centralized, institutional models to a more decentralized, innovation-driven landscape. She shares the mission of Digitalis Commons and explains how the organization is working at the intersection of technology, research, and public good to address systemic barriers in health and healthcare. Drawing from her recent article, "Notes on Catalyzing Health," Lara discusses the growing role of independent research institutions, the challenges of fragmentation, and why this moment calls for new leadership models and public-interest partnerships that can drive coordinated, high-impact solutions. Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant. Lara Mangravite, PhD, is Executive Director at Digitalis Commons, a nonprofit organization developing scalable, frontier-advancing solutions to critical problems in health. She previously served as President of Sage Bionetworks, where she led initiatives to build and share multi-modal human data for biomedical research. Lara earned her BS in Physics from Pennsylvania State University, her PhD in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University of California, San Francisco, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in cardiovascular pharmacogenomics at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute.