Valency Advisory Board
Highlighting Prof. Steinn Sigurðsson, Scientific Director of arXiv
I’m thrilled to announce our first advisory board members, Steinn Sigurðsson, Fernando Pérez, James Evans, and Darren Haas. Having worked with these powerhouses of scaling enterprise, academia, and open source has been an absolute pleasure during this first phase of Valency.
Today, I’ll highlight Valency advisor Steinn Sigurðsson. Steinn is a professor of astronomy and physics at Penn State University, the Science Editor of the Astrophysical Journal, former Trustee of the Aspen Center for Physics, and currently serves as the scientific director of arXiv, where he also founded and directs arXiv Labs. He’s been in his role at arXiv—the go-to preprint server for many academic fields—for more than 9 years, presiding over the Cambrian explosion in the growth of the paper submissions (it’s now ~3x the rate from when he first took the helm).1 His depth of understanding of the academic publication landscape is almost unmatched. Steinn received his Ph.D. in theoretical astrophysics from Caltech and was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Astronomy and a member of King’s College, Cambridge.
Since the inception of Valency, Steinn has been a huge supporter of our vision. In this video, you can hear Steinn talk about the importance of fast and ready access to a fresh corpus of literature for agents.
I trust Steinn and his perspective almost innately, borne out of our 30-year collaboration, mentorship, and friendship. Along with Sir Martin Rees (now Lord Rees, the Astronomer Royal) and the late Prof. Ralph Wijers, Steinn took me under his wing when I started my MPhil in Cambridge at the Institute of Astronomy in 1996. Our first paper together became the second chapter in my PhD thesis at Caltech.2 When the groundbreaking gravitational wave event GW170817 led to a stunning set of discoveries and insights, I called Steinn first to help me co-author the observer’s (me) and theorist’s (him) Perspective in Science magazine.3
Everyone at Valency has benefitted massively from Steinn’s insights and we can’t wait to continue the journey with his stewardship. Please drop me or Steinn an email if you’d like to learn more!
References & Further Reading
arXiv took in 123k submissions in 2017. Over the twelve months through August 2026 it took in 333k, with the busiest recent months running above 31,000. Source: arXiv monthly submission statistics, retrieved 15 September 2026. ↩︎
Bloom, J.S., Sigurdsson, S. & Pols, O.R. (1999). “The spatial distribution of coalescing neutron star binaries: implications for gamma-ray bursts.” MNRAS, 305, 763–769. DOI:10.1046/j.1365-8711.1999.02437.x ↩︎
Bloom, J.S. & Sigurdsson, S. (2017). “A cosmic multimessenger gold rush.” Science, 358, 301–302. DOI:10.1126/science.aaq0321 ↩︎
