Ryan Merkley is the Chief Operating Officer at NPR. He was most recently the CEO of Conscience, an emerging biotech nonprofit that uses AI and collaborative science to address areas of market failure in drug development. He was also a Fellow with the Aspen Institute, working on topics like AI, open source and intellectual property, data and privacy, and information integrity. He is the founding chair of the Flickr Foundation. Merkley spent over a decade as a C-suite executive in technology non-profits, including Chief of Staff at the Wikimedia Foundation, where he helped grow and strengthen its global network; five years as CEO at Creative Commons, focused on products, education, and sustainability; and Chief Operating Officer at Mozilla, helping to establish new strategy and build collaborative teams. He served as Director of Corporate Communications for the City of Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Games and was a Senior Advisor to Mayor David Miller in Toronto, where he led the mayor’s budget policy and initiated Toronto's Open Data project.
