Mark Barnes, J.D., law practice and his teaching at Yale focus on health care law and finance, human and animal research, stem cell and genetic research, research grants and contracts, research misconduct, and international research. Mr. Barnes formerly served at Harvard as the Senior Associate Provost and University Senior Research Officer and started and directed Harvard’s HIV/AIDS treatment programs in Nigeria, Tanzania and Botswana. He serves on the Ethics Working Group of the NIH’s HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN) and is the ethics advisor to HPTN Trial 071 in South Africa and Zambia. Mr. Barnes has held senior appointed positions in the New York City and State departments of health.
Archives: Team Members
Team Member
Justin McCarthy, JD
Justin McCarthy has over 27 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry, with expertise in pricing, market access, global health policy, legal and compliance. In his most recent role, he led the Patient & Health Impact (PHI) team at Pfizer, one of the world’s premier innovative biopharmaceutical companies whose global portfolio includes medicines and vaccines. He led a team of experts in health economics and outcomes research, real-world data and analytics, patient-centered outcomes assessment, market access, pricing, strategy and contracting, to generate evidence of the value of Pfizer medicines and vaccines and negotiate with governments and payers around the world to ensure access for patients. He also formed a team to explore novel approaches to bring medicines to the market through innovative partnerships and payment models.
Previously, Justin led Pfizer’s Global Policy & International Public Affairs efforts, responsible for defining Pfizer’s public policy positions and advancing government and public affairs strategies internationally. Additionally, Justin was Chief Counsel for Pfizer’s Worldwide Research and Development division, advising on regulatory, licensing and clinical trial issues, and overseeing global intellectual property activities.
Justin serves as a health policy and market access advisor, and has previously served on the Secretary’s Advisory Committee for Human Subject Protection, Subcommittee on Harmonization
Nina M. Hill, PhD
Dr. Hill is an independent consultant and the former Vice President of Innovation Policy, Global Policy at Pfizer. She is a member of external advisory boards of the Multiregional Clinical Trials Center at Harvard and Brigham and Womens’ Hospital and Vivli. Her work at Pfizer addressed anti-microbial resistance, unmet policy needs in clinical trials, compassionate access, oncology, and vaccines.
Prior to joining Pfizer, as a director of the International Center for the Disabled she helped secure passage of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. As a former leader of the March of Dimes in NYC, she worked to advanced maternal and infant health by advocating for expanded Medicaid coverage.
Holding a Ph.D. in Speech Science from Columbia University, she earned an MIT Certificate in Artificial Intelligence Business Strategies. She is a published author and graduate of the Executive Program, Columbia University Graduate School of Business and the Harvard Business School Pfizer Leadership Development Program.
Brian McCourt
Brian McCourt currently serves as Senior Director, Data and Knowledge Management at Duke Clinical Research Institute. He began his career as a study coordinator at Massachusetts General Hospital and has since held a variety of senior leadership roles spanning Clinical Data Management, Research Informatics and Technology areas at DCRI. His personal interests include the informatics methods and tools needed to operationalize complex industry and government research programs.
With over 25 years at Duke, he has been at the forefront of many strategic efforts to develop the infrastructure and capabilities needed to run demonstration projects and then scale-up capabilities for broader adoption of new best practices. Brian was central to launching DCRI’s Supporting Open Access for Researchers (SOAR) initiative – the set of data preparation, hosting, approval and provisioning practices for sharing of research datasets. Today, in addition to overseeing data operations for many research programs, he is helping drive the development and transition to a new cloud platform for research tools that includes data integration, hosting and visualization services.
Ida Sim, MD, PhD
Ida Sim, MD, PhD is Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She is UCSF’s inaugural Chief Research Informatics Officer and she co-directs the UCSF UC Berkeley Joint Program in Computational Precision Health. Dr. Sim earned her MD and her PhD in Medical Informatics from Stanford University, where her dissertation was on computational methods for data sharing of clinical trial results. She was trained in Primary Care Internal Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and completed fellowships in General Medicine and Medical Informatics at Stanford.
In 2005-6, Dr. Sim led the World Health Organization’s International Clinical Trials Registry Platform which established the first global policy on clinical trial registration and defined the common 20-item Trial Registration Data Set. She has led multiple NIH and other grants on “trial bank publishing,” ontology-based data sharing of human studies, and clinical trial visualization. Dr. Sim was a member of the 2015 Institute of Medicine committee on “Sharing Clinical Trial Data: Maximizing Benefits, Minimizing Risk.” She joined the MRCT Clinical Trials Data Sharing project in 2015 and is a co-founder of Vivli.
In other work, Dr. Sim is a national leader in mobile health and co-founder of the JupyterHealth project, an open software platform for secure personal health data ingestion and analytics. She has served on multiple national advisory committees on health information infrastructure for clinical care and research. She is a recipient of the United States Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, and a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation. She is a practicing clinician.
Murray Stewart, MD
Murray Stewart, M.D., is Chief Medical Officer at Rhythm Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Previously, he was Executive Vice President, Head of R&D, at Novelion Therapeutics Inc. From April 2014-September 2017, he was the Chief Medical Officer at GlaxoSmithKline. Dr. Stewart joined GSK in 2000 as Associate Director for Clinical Research & Development in the UK and since then has held a variety of positions in GSK he worked in Biopharm, was Therapy Area Head for the Cardiovascular and Metabolic therapy area. He has had extensive clinical development experience and worldwide regulatory interactions. Before joining the pharmaceutical industry, Dr. Stewart worked as a diabetes consultant and senior lecturer and was Consultant Physician/Honorary Senior Lecturer and Head of Clinical Services at the Diabetes Centre, Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK. His research was in lipid metabolism in type-2 diabetes, and he completed his medical training at Southampton Medical School in the UK and is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.
Robert Conklin
As Chief Technology Officer at Vivli, Robert Conklin is at the forefront of utilizing technological innovation to advance the state of clinical research. With over 25 years of experience in technology, Robert blends a deep understanding of scientific research with a approach to technological advancement.
In his role as CTO at Vivli, Robert leads the strategic direction for technology adoption and integration. His expertise spans a broad spectrum of areas, including data management, clinical trial automation, communication, and data security. He uses this expertise to further advance the Vivli platform, helping the world’s researchers to create new knowledge from the data that our members have shared.
Robert is passionate about leveraging emerging technologies to solve pressing challenges in clinical research to further the advancement of human knowledge. He has been instrumental in driving innovations that improve patient recruitment, streamline regulatory compliance, and ensure data integrity. His contributions have increased the speed, efficacy and safety of clinical trials at scale, and helped to create new knowledge.
Ida Sim, MD, PhD
Ida Sim, MD, PhD is Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She is UCSF’s inaugural Chief Research Informatics Officer and she co-directs the UCSF UC Berkeley Joint Program in Computational Precision Health. Dr. Sim earned her MD and her PhD in Medical Informatics from Stanford University, where her dissertation was on computational methods for data sharing of clinical trial results. She was trained in Primary Care Internal Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and completed fellowships in General Medicine and Medical Informatics at Stanford.
In 2005-6, Dr. Sim led the World Health Organization’s International Clinical Trials Registry Platform which established the first global policy on clinical trial registration and defined the common 20-item Trial Registration Data Set. She has led multiple NIH and other grants on “trial bank publishing,” ontology-based data sharing of human studies, and clinical trial visualization. Dr. Sim was a member of the 2015 Institute of Medicine committee on “Sharing Clinical Trial Data: Maximizing Benefits, Minimizing Risk.” She joined the MRCT Clinical Trials Data Sharing project in 2015 and is a co-founder of Vivli.
In other work, Dr. Sim is a national leader in mobile health and co-founder of the JupyterHealth project, an open software platform for secure personal health data ingestion and analytics. She has served on multiple national advisory committees on health information infrastructure for clinical care and research. She is a recipient of the United States Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, and a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation. She is a practicing clinician.
Stan Neumann
Stan Neumann is the Senior Director of Technical Operations at Vivli, where he is responsible for the reliability, usability and functionality of Vivli’s technical platform and supporting members and researchers who use the system. He is also responsible for QA and information and security management.
Prior to joining Vivli, Stan was a project manager and business analyst for BlueMetal Architects, where he helped numerous clients, define a technical vision and then realize that vision through a rigorous application of modern engineering practices and outstanding development skills. Prior to BlueMetal, Stan was the Director of Engineering at Axceler, where he helped the company grow from a startup to one of the most respected creators of SharePoint tools in the industry
Patricia Bradford, PhD
Patricia A. Bradford is the owner of Antimicrobial Development Specialists LLC, a consulting company that focuses on the late-stage development of antibiotics. Prior to this she was at AstraZeneca and was responsible for the microbiology support contributing to the successful development and approval of ceftazidime-avibactam. Before joining AstraZeneca, Dr. Bradford worked in antibiotic research for Novartis, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals and Lederle Laboratories. During her tenure at Wyeth she worked on a number of antibiotic projects and was instrumental in the team that wrote the dossier for the registration and approval of tigecycline. She was also heavily involved in the studies for several sNDA applications for piperacillin-tazobactam.
Dr. Bradford is fellow in the American Academy of Microbiology, has over 100 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals and has written several review articles and book chapters. She served as an editor for Antimicrobial Agents Chemotherapy 2001-2011 and is currently a Senior Editor for ASM’s newest journal, mSphere. She is also an active participant with the subcommittee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing of the Clinical Laboratory Standards Institute.
Prior to working industry, she worked as a clinical microbiologist at Nebraska Methodist Hospital in Omaha. Dr. Bradford received a B.S. in Medical Technology from the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Ph.D. in Medical Microbiology from Creighton University and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in β-lactamase research.