Deborah Zarin MD

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 as
the quality of clinical trials reporting. She worked with colleagues to develop a framework for understanding the
sources of uninformative (low value) clinical trials and is now engaged in several research projects to identify
points 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.