Elizabeth Stuart, PhD, associate professor of mental health and biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has been named chair of a new Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) advisory panel that will focus on clinical trials. The advisory panel, one of several unveiled by PCORI this year, draws from a cross section of academics and practitioners, including patients, physicians, statisticians and ethicists.
"This is an absolute honor,” says Stuart. “Clinical trials are a crucial part of PCORI's portfolio in terms of helping us learn which interventions and treatments are most effective. I look forward to working to ensure that the clinical trials funded by PCORI are designed and implemented in a way that ensures that they are of the utmost quality, while also answering the questions of most relevance to patients."
Stuart specializes in randomized trials, including handling complexities such as missing data, clustering, mediation analysis and noncompliance. Before joining the Bloomberg School in 2006, Stuart was a researcher at Mathematica Policy Research in Washington, D.C., where she worked on a number of large-scale randomized trials of social interventions. Stuart says the clinical-trials advisory panel will help PCORI think about the best ways to design and implement trials.
Stuart’s appointment was approved by PCORI’s Board of Governors at its June 17 meeting, along with the chair and co-chairs of a panel on rare diseases. “Our new advisory panels will benefit greatly from the leadership of these individuals,” PCORI Executive Director Joe Selby, MD, MPH, said in a PCORI news release. “Each panel will be led by a pair of individuals whose complementary expertise and backgrounds will ensure that the panels’ work will be both scientifically rigorous and focused on the interests and needs of patients and those who care for them.”
PCORI was created by Congress in 2010 as part of the Affordable Care Act to help patients, clinicians, and policy makers make well-informed decisions about health care and ultimately improve health outcomes. Last year, PCORI funded more than $200 million in research projects. Over the next two years, PCORI expects to fund an additional $1 billion in new research projects, according to its 2013 annual report.
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health media contacts: Stephanie Desmon at sdesmon@jhu.edu or 410-955-7619 and Barbara Benham at bbenham1@jhu.edu or 410-614-6029.
