Seema Kumar is vice president of innovation for global health and science policy communication for Johnson & Johnson. Prior to joining J&J in 2003, she was chief communications officer at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research/MIT Center for Genome Research, the flagship center for the Human Genome Project. Previously, she held positions of increasing leadership at the National Institutes of Health and the Johns Hopkins medical institutions, where she launched and led initiatives to communicate and position scientific advances and policy implications and STEM initiatives for high school students. Kumar serves on several boards and has authored more than 200 news and feature articles on science and medicine.