Alex Humphreys is vice president of innovation at ITHAKA, where he leads ITHAKA Labs, a team that scouts new ways to expand access to education and knowledge using research and development, product discovery, lean business development, and service incubation. Formerly known as JSTOR Labs, ITHAKA Labs partners with colleagues in Ithaka S+R and JSTOR along with higher education institutions, funders, community organizations, publishers, and libraries to develop and test interventions and achieve impact that can scale.  

ITHAKA Labs incubates promising new services such as Transfer Explorer, a service to help students and those who support them see how their course credits and prior learning experiences will transfer and count, and the JSTOR Access in Prison Initiative, which provides library resources to incarcerated learners.

The Labs team also discovers and develops strategic partnerships, investments, and acquisitions that complement and are aligned with ITHAKA’s mission. For example, ITHAKA invested in and partnered with Perlego, a startup that improves student success by providing affordable access to more than 1 million textbooks through an easy-to-use, tool-rich digital library.

Before launching ITHAKA 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 a master’s in creative writing from Hunter College. He is the coach of ITHAKA’s mighty softball team, the Ithakapokalypse.