Annette Thomas, S.B., ’93 Ph.D.
Trustee
Annette Thomas is a senior advisor to General Atlantic, a global growth equity firm, and a non-executive director on the board of the global education company Pearson PLC. She has overseen some of the leading academic publishing, media, and data analytics companies in the world.
A trained scientist, Ms. Thomas earned her undergraduate degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. in cell biology and neuroscience from Yale. She has served as managing director of Nature Publishing Group, the world’s premier scientific publisher, and as chief executive officer of Macmillan Publishers Ltd. Later, she was CEO of Web of Science Group—which, as part of the analytics company Clarivate, provides insights and analytics to researchers and research institutions worldwide—and, most recently, CEO of Guardian Media Group, the parent company of The Guardian and The Observer newspapers. She has overseen numerous business transformations with a view to creating long-term sustainable growth on a global scale.
Ms. Thomas was recognized with the Kim Scott Walwyn Prize for exceptional women in publishing and is a recipient of the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal, awarded by Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She has served as a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Center for Biotechnology Information and on the board of Creative Commons. She was elected an alumni fellow in 2016.