JOHN E. OSBORN is a lawyer, diplomat, and healthcare business executive, investor and advisor.  Most recently, he served as Executive Vice President & General Counsel of US Oncology, Inc., the leading integrated cancer services company.

In 2007, John was nominated by President George W. Bush, and confirmed by the United States Senate in 2008, to serve as one of seven members of the bipartisan United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, which is charged with evaluating the government's policies and programs in this area.  In 2004, he was appointed by then U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to serve as a national member of the board of governors of the East-West Center in Honolulu, an education and research organization focused on the Asia Pacific region.  After working on the 1980 and 1988 presidential campaigns of George H.W. Bush, he served from 1989 to 1992 as Special Assistant to the Legal Adviser with the U.S. Department of State.  He has testified before the U.S. Antitrust Modernization Commission, and was a delegate to the 1996 Republican National Convention in San Diego.  Early in his career, he worked on Capitol Hill in the offices of former Congressman Jim Leach and the late Senator John Heinz, and was a policy analyst with the Congressional Budget Office.

While at US Oncology, Inc., he worked with lead private equity investor Welsh Carson Anderson & Stowe to negotiate a multi-billion dollar merger transaction with McKesson Corporation.  He also has advised major life sciences companies such as AstraZeneca and Novartis on strategy, legal, policy and regulatory matters, served as a member of the pharmaceutical and medical products advisory board of the international consulting firm McKinsey & Company, and was a founding member of the board of directors of Incept BioSystems, Inc., a privately held biomedical device company based on technology developed at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

For more than a decade, he held senior executive positions with Cephalon, Inc., a leading biopharmaceutical company, where he was most recently Executive Vice President, General Counsel & Secretary and was responsible for all legal, intellectual property, government affairs, corporate and public affairs, compliance and quality assurance matters.  In this period, the company grew rapidly from a research stage venture to a Fortune 1000/S&P 500/NASDAQ 100 publicly traded firm with multinational operations and annual sales revenue of more than two billion.  Among other things, he secured more than five years of additional exclusivity for the company’s flagship product through an innovative patent litigation settlement strategy, resolved government investigations into product quality and sales promotion issues, and coordinated the legislative effort that led to the enactment of the Controlled Substances Export Control Reform Act of 2005.

Earlier in his career, he was Vice President & Associate General Counsel with the DuPont Merck Pharmaceutical Company, where he served as group general counsel for the European pharmaceutical and global medical imaging businesses.  He also has practiced corporate and securities law in Boston with Hale and Dorr (now Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr), where he counseled technology-based companies and was a member of a U.S. Supreme Court appellate team that successfully challenged the "sale of business" securities law doctrine (Landreth Timber Company).   Following law school, he clerked for Senior Judge Albert V. Bryan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

During 2008, John was a visiting research fellow with the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford and a senior member of Wadham College.  He also has been a visiting fellow and research collaborator in politics at Princeton University, a guest lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, a visiting scholar in East European Studies with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and an Eisenhower Fellow to the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland where he examined the roots of the conflict and status of the peace process.

John has written on legal, public policy and international affairs issues for

The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post,

The Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Affairs, Yale Journal of Health Policy Law & Ethics, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, SAIS Review of International Affairs, and the American Journal of International Law.   He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Law Institute, and the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation.  In 2007, he was named one of the Lawdragon 500 Leading Lawyers in America.

John studied at the College of William & Mary, and is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of The University of Iowa, where he was an alumni fellow in 2008.  He completed graduate work in international affairs at Princeton and Johns Hopkins, where he received a master's degree.  He earned his law degree at the University of Virginia, where he was articles editor of the Virginia Journal of International Law and was elected to membership in the Raven Society.

John lives in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and Siasconset, Massachusetts with his wife and two daughters.