MERIT Executive Spotlight is a series featuring executive team members introducing themselves and explaining why they chose to work in the clinical trials industry and at MERIT.
What is your role at MERIT?
There are many aspects to my role at MERIT as a Medical Director. The overall unifying theme is to help the Reading Center team deliver high quality and timely data analysis on images. This is very important because these images are used to make important decisions about safety and efficacy for novel ophthalmic drugs that are under development.
My role includes grading images, as well as adjudicating when there may be different interpretations or an unusual situation present. We may also have medical input into the charter and the grading forms so we can work with the teams and sponsors to make sure that we have a unified approach that is tailored to the details of each project. This helps us consistently provide high quality and reproducible image interpretation. I’m also involved with data review, team training, and quality control.
What do you like about working at MERIT?
For me, like many others, the people and the culture are the most important things about a company. It’s wonderful to work with a group of people who see themselves as one big team. I really appreciate people’s positive, can-do attitude and how they’re willing to think outside the box if necessary. The focus is always on delivering for our customers, but we also keep the big picture in mind. Ultimately, this is for all the patients who are in the trial and who may potentially benefit from these medicines.
What is your background?
I am an ophthalmologist and I did fellowship training in medical retina at the Duke Eye Center. As part of that, I was involved in many different research projects including some that were more basic science and others that were much more clinical. One of the exciting things that took place during my time as a medical student and resident was the beginning of the period when anti-VEGF medications and SD-OCT became the standard of care for many retinal diseases. The outcomes and improvements achieved for patients with a number of very serious and blinding conditions, including wet macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, and diabetic macular edema, were revolutionary.
Prior to that I completed a combined MD and PhD training program. At that point most of my research had been very much in basic science, which was fascinating and I enjoyed it. Towards the very end of my time in medical school was when I first had exposure to ophthalmology. I realized that it was an absolutely fascinating field that combined a lot of different interests that I had including physics, optics, imaging, and image analysis.
Why did you get into clinical research?
From a very young age I have been interested in fixing things, understanding how they work, and making them better. At the same time, I enjoy building new things that help people. I learned a lot about this by watching my father, who was an infectious disease physician, and being exposed to some of his smaller research projects. Before I went to medical school, I volunteered with a center participating in the AIDS Clinical Trial Group in New York City, where I’m from. This was during the peak of the epidemic. When I worked with some of the clinical trial nurses and staff there, I saw what they were doing, putting in enormous efforts to do everything they could to help patients, many of whom were in desperate need of better treatments. Over the years it was incredible to see the progress made in treating HIV. This really highlighted what can be accomplished by a dedicated team of researchers and patients working together towards a common goal.
What do you do in your free time?
I am based out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I love to spend time hiking in the mountains near Boone, North Carolina with my family and our dog, Jack. I enjoy playing the guitar, and I love listening to music, especially rock and blues and classical.
