Advisory Board

Ryan Brown supports Circuit Clinical’s, efforts in ensuring the organizations solutions enable diversity, inclusion and clinical trials as a care option for all potential participants in clinical trials. She came to Circuit following a stint leading Science 37 , a decentralized clinical trial technology company, Diversity in Clinical Trial efforts, as Sr. Director Global Head Diversity & Inclusion in Clinical Trials. Her experience spans Contract Research Organizations (CRO): PRA Health Sciences (ICON Plc), PPD (ThermoFisher Scientific), and Worldwide Clinical Trials. At the CROs, she was actively engaged in clinical operations, business development, and a strategic commercial leadership role. Ryan also has 15+ years’ experience driving diversity & high priority initiatives across academia, grassroots community organizations, clinical industry task forces: Advisory Board for the Yale Collaboration for Regulatory Rigor, Integrity, and Transparency (CRRIT), Association of Clinical Research Organizations (ACRO) and Center for Information and Study on Clinical Research Participation (CISCRP) and collaborating with patient advocacy organizations such as International Children’s Advocacy Network. She is a sought after speaker and thought leader in the space participating in events featured in PharmaVoice Women of the Week, Yale’s Annual Healthcare Conference, WOCIP (Women of Color in Pharma), Women in Bio, JP Morgan and Consuli’s Clinical Trial Clubhouse on Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. Ryan earned her Bachelor of Science in Chemistry at Kentucky State University, Master’s in Public Administration- Healthcare Administration & Finance Concentration at the University of Kentucky and holds a Certificate in Diversity & Inclusion from Cornell University.

Sneha graduated from Indiana University in May 2020 where she majored in chronic illness advocacy as well as journalism. She created Generation Patient and its program the Crohn’s and Colitis Young Adults Network (CCYAN) to develop support systems for adolescents and young adults with chronic conditions across the U.S. and internationally. She is proud to work with a team composed entirely of young adults with chronic conditions and also to keep Generation Patient and CCYAN independent from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Sneha has completed an undergraduate research fellowship in health policy at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She has also interned at numerous places such as Pfizer in health economics and outcomes research for Inflammation and Immunology. Sneha has spoken on Capitol Hill, featured nationally on C-SPAN, and is a past contributor for U.S. News and World Report. She has served on the Democratic National Committee Disability Policy Subcommittee and recently joined the Midwest Comparative Effectiveness Public Advisory Council, an independent appraisal committee of the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review. She also serves on the FDA Patient Engagement Collaborative and in a grantmaking committee with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Sneha was awarded two academic fellowships with the Association of Health Care Journalists. For her work, she was selected as one of the most influential teenagers in 2018 by the We Are Family Foundation and was recognized as an American Association of People with Disabilities Emerging Leader in 2020.

Gregg Gonsalves is an expert in policy modeling on infectious disease and substance use, as well as the intersection of public policy and health equity. His research focuses on the use of quantitative models for improving the response to epidemic diseases. For more than 30 years, he worked on HIV/AIDS and other global health issues with several organizations, including the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, the Treatment Action Group, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa. He is a 2011 graduate of Yale College and received his PhD from Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences/School of Public Health in 2017. He is currently the public health correspondent for The Nation. He is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.

Amy Kapczynski is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School and faculty director of the Global Health Justice Partnership. She joined the Yale Law faculty in January 2012. Her areas of research include information policy, intellectual property law, international law, and global health. Prior to coming to Yale, she taught at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. She also served as a law clerk to Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Stephen G. Breyer at the U.S. Supreme Court, and to Judge Guido Calabresi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She received her A.B. from Princeton University, M. Phil. from Cambridge University, M.A. from Queen Mary and Westfield College at University of London, and J.D. from Yale Law School.

Harlan Krumholz is a cardiologist and scientist at Yale University and Yale New Haven Hospital. He is the Harold H. Hines, Jr. Professor of Medicine. He is a leading expert in the science to improve the quality and efficiency of care, eliminate disparities and promote equity, improve integrity and transparency in medical research, engage patients in their care, and avoid wasteful practices. Recent efforts are focused on harnessing the digital transformation in healthcare to accelerate knowledge generation and facilitate the delivery of care aligned with each patient’s needs and preferences. Dr. Krumholz is director of the Yale New Haven Hospital Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE), an organization dedicated to improving health and health care through research, tools, and practices that produce discovery, heighten accountability, and promote better public health and clinical care. He co-founded and co-leads the Yale University Open Data Access (YODA) Project, designed to increase access to clinical research data and promote their use to generate new knowledge. He also co-founded and co-leads medRxiv, a non-profit preprint server for the medical and health sciences. He was a founding faculty co-director of the Yale Center for Research Computing. Dr. Krumholz has been honored by membership in the National Academy of Medicine, the Association of American Physicians, and the American Society for Clinical Investigation. He was named a Distinguished Scientist of the American Heart Association and received their Award of Meritorious Achievement and their Clinical Research Prize. He served as a member of the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Krumholz received the Friendship Award from the People’s Republic of China in recognition of his collaborative efforts to develop a national cardiovascular research network and was named by the Chinese Society of Cardiology as a Top-10 Distinguished International Cardiologist for his contributions to the development of cardiovascular medicine in China. He founded the American Heart Association’s Quality of Care and Outcomes Research Council and co-founded their annual conference. He was the founding editor of Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes; founding editor of CardioExchange, a social media site of the publisher of the New England Journal of Medicine; and editor of Journal Watch Cardiology of the New England Journal of Medicine. He was a founding Governor of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. He is the incoming Editor-in-Chief of JACC, a pre-eminent cardiovascular medical journal. He co-founded HugoHealth, a patient-centric platform to engage people as partners in research and clinical care, facilitate the secure acquisition and movement of digital health data, and promote learning health communities. He co-founded Refactor Health, an enterprise healthcare AI-augmented health data management company. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1992, Dr. Krumholz received a BS (Biology) from Yale, an MD from Harvard Medical School, and a Masters in Health Policy and Management (SM) from the Harvard University School of Public Health. At Yale, he directed the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program from 1996-2017 and serves as Director Emeritus of the Yale National Clinician Scholars Program. Dr. Krumholz has published over 1500 articles and three books with an h-index of more than 230.

Peter Lurie, M.D., M.P.H. is President of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. CSPI envisions a healthy population with reduced impact and burden of preventable diseases and an equitable food system that makes healthy, sustainable food accessible to all. CSPI publishes a newsletter, Nutrition Action, and conducts advocacy on Capitol Hill, in the regulatory agencies, in the courts, at the state and local level, and through corporate campaigns. Previously, Lurie was the Associate Commissioner for Public Health Strategy and Analysis at the Food and Drug Administration, where he worked on antimicrobial resistance, agency transparency, caffeinated beverages, arsenic in rice, expanded access to investigational drugs, and prescription drug abuse. Prior to that, he was Deputy Director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, where he addressed drug and device issues, coauthored the organization’s Worst Pills, Best Pills consumer guide to medications, and led efforts to reduce worker exposure to hexavalent chromium and beryllium. Earlier, as a faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco and the University of Michigan, he studied needle exchange programs, ethical aspects of mother-to-infant HIV transmission studies, and other HIV policy issues domestically and abroad.

Christopher Morten is an expert on technology, health, information, and “intellectual property” law, and the founding director of Columbia Law School’s Science, Health, and Information Clinic.In his clinical work, Morten seeks to serve the public interest by fighting for more equitable access to scientific, technical, and medical knowledge. His scholarship grows out of his clinical work. It considers how law and policy shape the ways that knowledge flows through our economy and society and how law and policy influence how new technologies are invented, validated, manufactured, distributed, and used. Some of his recent publications describe the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s legal authority to publicize a trove of valuable scientific data it currently keeps secret; analyze the U.S. government’s power to use privately patented technologies in the public interest; and present a progressive vision for the pharmaceutical and biotech sectors of our economy and society, post-COVID-19.Morten joined the Columbia Law faculty in 2021. Previously, he was the deputy director of the Technology Law and Policy Clinic at New York University School of Law, a fellow at NYU’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy, a supervising attorney and clinical lecturer in Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic, and the staff attorney at Yale’s Collaboration for Research Integrity and Transparency. He remains a visiting fellow of Yale’s Global Health Justice Partnership and an affiliate fellow of Yale’s Information Society Project. Before beginning his teaching career, Morten worked as a litigation associate and science adviser at Goodwin Procter and as a patent agent at Baker Botts. He also clerked for Judge Timothy B. Dyk of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Joshua is a Professor of the Practice in Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he also serves as Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement and as Director of the Bloomberg American Health Initiative.A pediatrician by training, he is a former health commissioner of Baltimore, Principal Deputy Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and health secretary of Maryland. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Public Administration.One of the focus areas of Dr. Sharfstein's work is crisis and emergency management. He teaches a class entitled "Crisis and Response in Public Health Policy and Practice" and is the author of The Public Health Crisis Survival Guide: Leadership and Management in Trying Times, published in 2018 by Oxford University Press.

Neil brings more than two decades of experience as a public health expert to the fight against ALS. He has led The ALS Association’s mission programs – research, care services, and advocacy – since 2018. Before joining the Association, Dr. Thakur served in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of the Director, making NIH research more impactful. He managed the world’s largest policy to make biomedical research papers publicly accessible and co-chaired the White House taskforce that lead to the requirement that all federal science agencies adopt similar policies. He also spent a year on detail to the US Senate Special Committee on Aging, focusing on effective long-term health care. Prior to his time at NIH, he was Assistant Director of Health Services Research and Development at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Dr. Thakur has received numerous federal awards, including the Secretary for Health and Human Services’ award for Meritorious Service, the second highest award that the Secretary can bestow. Dr. Thakur holds a Ph.D. in Health Policy from Yale University School of Public Health and completed a NIMH postdoctoral fellowship in mental health services research at the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

She is currently the Director of the Program for Advancement of the Clinical Research Enterprise at the MRCT Center of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard. Prior to that, she was the Director of ClinicalTrials.gov.As the Director of ClinicalTrials.gov at the National Institutes of Health, she led the development of the world’s largest trial registry, contributed to a series of policy initiatives in the US and internationally designed to improve the reporting of clinical trials, developed the first ever structured database of summary trial results, and oversaw the implementation of Section 8 of the Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act (FDAAA) that mandates the reporting of most clinical trials conducted at US academic medical centers, as well as trials conducted by industry throughout the world. In addition to serving as a key advisor for the various policies and overseeing the development and operations at ClinicalTrials.gov, she led a research program focused on improving trial reporting policies, and using data generated from ClinicalTrials.gov to analyze issues within the clinical research enterprise that interfere with the optimal generation of evidence to guide clinical and policy decisions.Dr. Zarin has focused her career on applying evidence to improve the quality of critical clinical, policy and research decisions. Specific positions have enabled her to focus on clinical decisions in psychiatry, payment and coverage decisions for the Medicare program, and overarching issues related to the reporting and conduct of clinical trials. Since joining the MRCT Center, Dr. Zarin has focused on improving the quality of clinical trials, as well asthe quality of clinical trials reporting. She worked with colleagues to develop a framework for understanding thesources of uninformative (low value) clinical trials and is now engaged in several research projects to identifypoints of leverage for decreasing the initiation of low value trials.Deborah Zarin is currently the Director of the Program for Advancement of the Clinical Research Enterprise at the MRCT Center of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard. Prior to that, she was the Director of ClinicalTrials.gov.