About

Hi, I’m Dave Flanagan. 👋

I’m the VP of AI Services at Wiley, where I help one of the world’s leading scholarly publishers figure out how to make AI actually work for editors and researchers. My job is building GenAI systems that enhance research evaluation and publication workflows—things like intelligent referee recommendation, research integrity detection, and automation that saves editors time so they can focus on the editorial decisions that matter.

I’m convinced we’re heading toward a future where skilled researchers and GenAI agents collaborate as a hybrid workforce to make research communication better. We’re just starting to see the possibilities today, but these systems are getting more capable every month.

My path here started with a PhD in Polymer Science and Engineering from UMass Amherst and Caltech. In 2004, I moved from Pasadena to Germany to start as an Assistant Editor for Advanced Materials. I went on to become Editor-in-Chief of Advanced Functional Materials and launched MaterialsViews (now Advanced Science News) and MaterialsViewsChina, Wiley’s first Chinese-language science news site.

After almost a decade in editorial, I moved to product management and launched the award-winning predictive retrosynthesis tool ChemPlanner. When data science became essential to publishing, I taught myself Python and machine learning to provide data-driven insights to our editorial teams. I also work extensively on research integrity challenges in the AI era.

I speak regularly at conferences and webinars about the intersection of GenAI and scholarly publishing, sharing what we’re learning as we implement these systems in production.

I’ve been in Germany for more than 20 years now, where in my spare time I photograph industrial history and the local winemaking landscape.

You can connect with me on LinkedIn.