Alex Humphreys is Vice President, Innovation, at ITHAKA, where he leads a team that scouts and develops the future of research and education through projects, partnerships and investments. Through JSTOR Labs, the Innovation team works with partners to create tools for researchers, teachers and students that are immediately useful—and a little bit magical. For example, the JSTOR Understanding Series links every passage in literary and historical texts to articles and chapters quoting that passage, and the award-winning Text Analyzer lets you search for articles and chapters by uploading any document.

The team incubates promising new services such as Constellate, a platform that helps faculty easily and effectively teach text analysis and data skills, and the JSTOR Access in Prison Initiative, which provides library resources to incarcerated learners.

Last, the Innovation team discovers and develops strategic partnerships, investments and acquisitions that are aligned and complementary with ITHAKA’s mission. For example, ITHAKA invested in and partnered with Anno.co, the public benefit company that is home to the Hypothesis annotation service.

Before launching JSTOR Labs, Alex spearheaded the effort to replace JSTOR’s platform with a cloud-hosted, services-oriented, open-source-based architecture.

Prior to his time at ITHAKA, Alex worked at Oxford University Press, Inc., where he built an award-winning publishing platform for OUP’s subscription-based websites.

Alex graduated from Hamilton College and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College. He is the coach of ITHAKA’s mighty softball team, the Ithakapokalypse.