Brian D. Crawford, PhD PhD ’82

Brian D. Crawford, PhD ’82,  is a strategy consultant and advisor with expertise in the biomedical and biochemical sciences, serving clients within the global scientific, technical, and medical (STM) publishing industry. He is a non-executive director of the British Medical Journal Publishing Group, as well as a member of the board of directors and chair of the audit committee with the Copyright Clearance Center. Over a scientific publishing career spanning more than three decades, he served in longstanding executive leadership roles, notably as president of the American Chemical Society’s Publications Division and earlier as vice president of Global Life and Medical Sciences Publishing with John Wiley & Sons, Inc. He has been active in publishing trade associations, including the board of directors of the Association of American Publishers, which he chaired from 2014–15, as well as the executive committee of the International STM Association, to which he was elected for two terms. He was also appointed to volunteer positions on the American Medical Association’s Journal Oversight Committee for JAMA and the JAMA Network, as well as the Scientific Publishing Committee of the American Heart Association. Brian began his publishing career within the Journals Publishing Division of Academic Press, Inc., where he first gained recognition for partnering with the distinguished human geneticist Victor McKusick, MD, of Johns Hopkins Medicine on the conception, development, and initial publication in 1987 of Genomics, the first peer-reviewed journal devoted to the eponymous field of scientific study that emerged in parallel with that publication. 

Prior to entering scientific publishing, Crawford was engaged in both research and university teaching. He had the distinction of being the first biologist to be appointed as a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he was a member of the scientific research staff within the Genetics Group of the Life Sciences Division, and joined in early DOE-sponsored efforts that led to the international initiative to map and sequence the human genome. Crawford completed his doctoral studies in the biochemical and biophysical sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health in 1982, where he specialized in cellular and molecular aspects of cancer genetics under sponsorship from the National Cancer Institute, having received earlier his bachelor's of science cum laude with High Honors in Chemistry from the University of Maryland at College Park.