Joni L. Rutter, Ph.D., is Research Week 2023 keynote speaker on Monday, May 1.
Director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) at the National Institutes of Health, Rutter oversees the planning and execution of the Center’s multifaceted programs that aim to overcome scientific and operational barriers to developing and delivering new treatments and other health solutions.
The Next Ten Years:
NCATS’ Audacious Goals
Joni L. Rutter, Ph.D.
Monday, May 1, noon
Since Rutter’s appointment as NCATS director in 2022, NCATS has established ambitious goals for more treatments to all people more quickly). Most importantly, all aspects of the biomedical research enterprise — everything from training and career development, preclinical research and drug development, to clinical trials and implementation — should reflect the diversity of our country, so that everyone can benefit from the results.
Dr. Rutter joined NCATS in 2019 as deputy director. She has created strong networks across public and private sectors to inform existing and developing NCATS programs and significantly expanded these efforts as acting director. She has championed approaches for leveraging real world data and artificial intelligence/machine learning to rapidly address public health questions. In the area of rare disease research, Dr. Rutter led an initiative that used data from health care systems to calculate approximate health care costs for the millions of people with rare diseases. This and related initiatives prompted recommendations, such as enhancing the collection of rare disease patient data, to reduce the economic and medical burdens facing this community. She also led the National COVID Cohort Collaborative from inception to implementation, and it is now one of the largest collections of secure and deidentified clinical data in the United States for COVID-19 research.
Prior to joining NCATS, Rutter served as the director of scientific programs within the All of Us Research Program, where she led the scientific programmatic development and implementation efforts to build a national research cohort of at least 1 million U.S. participants to advance precision medicine. During her time at NIH, she also has led the Division of Neuroscience and Behavior at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). In this role, she developed and coordinated research on basic and clinical neuroscience, brain and behavioral development, genetics, epigenetics, computational neuroscience, bioinformatics, and drug discovery. Rutter also coordinated the NIDA Genetics Consortium and biospecimen repository.
