She serves as chair of the Compassionate Use Advisory Committee Infectious Diseases (CompAC ID) and as deputy chair of several other CompACs. She attended the University of Virginia for her BA and Master’s of bioethics degrees and Columbia University for her MPH and PhD. She served in the Peace Corps in Cote d’Ivoire; led a team of public health researchers in Louisiana after hurricanes Katrina and Rita; and spent a year “embedded” in the Johns Hopkins Oncology Center, recruiting terminally ill cancer patients for a study investigating these patients’ knowledge and understanding of clinical research. She has written and spoken frequently on the history and ethics of using humans as research subjects and on pre-approval access to drugs.