Lead author

In academic publishing, the lead author, or first author, is the first named author of a publication such as a research article or audit.

Academic authorship standards vary widely across disciplines. In many academic subjects, including the natural sciences, computer science and electrical engineering, the lead author of a research article is typically the person who carried out the research, wrote and edited the paper. The list of trailing co-authors reflects, typically, diminishing contributions to the work reported in the manuscript. Sometimes, journals require statements detailing each author's contributions to be included in each publication. In other disciplines (such as mathematics) however, authors are typically listed alphabetically rather than by contribution.

The proportion of multi-author papers has increased in recent decades, reflecting increasingly complex multi-investigator research projects, as well as the "publish or perish" culture of academic performance evaluation.

Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Kara Sandberg (/ˈsændbərɡ/; born August 28, 1969) is an American technology executive, activist, and author. She is the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook. In June 2012, she was elected to the board of directors by the existing board members, becoming the first woman to serve on Facebook's board. Before she joined Facebook as its COO, Sandberg was Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google and was involved in launching Google's philanthropic arm Google.org. Before Google, Sandberg served as chief of staff for United States Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers.

In 2012 she was named in the Time 100, an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world according to Time magazine.As of June 2015, Sandberg is reported to be worth over US$1 billion, due to her stock holdings in Facebook and other companies.

Early life and education

Sandberg was born in 1969 in Washington, D.C. to a Jewish family, the daughter of Adele (née Einhorn) and Joel Sandberg, and the oldest of three children. Her father is an ophthalmologist and her mother was a college teacher of the French language. Adele taught English as a second language and founded Ear Peace-Save Your Hearing, a nonprofit that teaches teens how to prevent hearing loss. She dropped out of a Ph.D. program when she was pregnant with Sheryl and concentrated on raising her children. Sheryl's maternal grandmother, Rosalind Einhorn, grew up in a poor family in a crowded apartment in New York City, finished high school in spite of being pulled out during The Great Depression, went on to community college, graduated from U.C. Berkeley, and later saved her family business from financial ruin. Sandberg's family was active in helping Soviet Jews make aliyah to Israel during refusenik era and attended rallies during the weekends. She and her siblings had Soviet Bar and Bat Mitzvah twins. Her parents were detained and interrogated in Kishinev and later expelled from the USSR.