Heather joined Open Philanthropy in August 2016. Her goal is to identify philanthropic opportunities in transformative basic and applied research that have important societal impact. She was director of the Bakar Fellows Program for faculty entrepreneurs at UC Berkeley, a senior strategic advisor at the Energy Biosciences Institute at UC Berkeley, and an assistant professor at Michigan Technological University. She received a B.S. in biology from Michigan Technological University and a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from Oregon Health and Science University, and was an NIH post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University.