About Elizabeth
Dr. Elizabeth Iorns is an award-winning scientist, entrepreneur, and activist renowned for transforming how scientific research is conducted and verified. Frustrated by the difficulty of finding specialized equipment and collaborators as a breast cancer researcher, she co-founded and currently serves as the CEO of Science Exchange in 2011. Science Exchange is an innovative online marketplace that allows researchers, particularly those from major pharmaceutical and biotech companies, to easily outsource experiments to a global network of qualified academic and commercial laboratories. The company’s mission is to drastically improve the speed and efficiency of R&D by simplifying the entire outsourcing process. Often described as “Uber for Experiments,” Science Exchange was recently acquired by Waud Capital Partners in late 2024, marking a major success in the life sciences technology space. Beyond her entrepreneurial success, Elizabeth has been a leader in addressing the “reproducibility crisis” in science—the issue of scientific findings that cannot be reliably repeated by other researchers. She helped launch the Reproducibility Initiative, a project that uses the Science Exchange platform to have key experimental results independently validated by third-party labs. Her efforts to accelerate discovery and promote research quality have earned her significant recognition, including being named one of Nature magazine’s “Ten People Who Mattered” and one of WIRED‘s “50 Women Who Are Changing The World.”
