In Memory of Philip E. Bourne (1953-2026)

J.W. Bizzaro • March 10, 2026

In Memory of Philip E. Bourne (1953-2026)
(1 comment)

Philip E. Bourne, founding dean of the University of Virginia School of Data Science, died on March 8, 2026, at age 72 after a long battle with mesothelioma.

In 2009, I presented Phil with the Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences. The award recognized his extensive work promoting free and open access to scientific materials, methods, and data in bioinformatics and computational biology.

Phil served as founding editor-in-chief of PLoS Computational Biology, helping establish it as a leading open-access journal from the Public Library of Science. He co-founded SciVee.tv, a platform that let scientists share videos, presentations, and posters openly. His efforts also supported broad public access to biomolecular structure data through the Protein Data Bank.

From 2014 to 2017, Phil directed data science at the National Institutes of Health as associate director for data science, leading the Big Data to Knowledge initiative. Throughout his career, he consistently advocated for data sharing, preprints, and open scholarly communication.

In 2017, Phil came to UVA to launch the School of Data Science, the university's newest school, and guided its emphasis on open, collaborative, data-driven research. His dedication helped create a more transparent and inclusive scientific community. Phil's contributions were generous, persistent, and far-reaching; he will be remembered and missed by many of us who worked alongside him in the open science movement.

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Phil Bourne

Submitted by Eric Martz ; posted on Tuesday, March 10, 2026

So sorry to learn of Phil's passing and battle with mesothelioma. In 1999, Phil hosted my one-month stay the U Cal San Diego branch of RCSB (wwPDB). We installed my Protein Explorer as a structure viewing option at RCSB PDB. Subsequently he arranged hosting of several of my projects including FirstGlance in Jmol on the SDSC servers. We had fun and he was a great guy!

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