Who is Monica Bertagnolli, Biden ’s pick to lead NIH?

Monica Bertagnolli never had the luxury of easing into her new job as head of the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI). Several weeks after taking over the largest component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in October 2022, the then–63-year-old surgical oncologist was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer and underwent surgery followed by chemotherapy and radiation treatment. Early this month, she unveiled a plan to implement President Joe Biden’s signature Cancer Moonshot initiative. And Biden is expected to cap Bertagnolli’s whirlwind first 7 months in Washington, D.C., by nominating her to become the 17th director of NIH, the federal government’s crown jewel of biomedical research. Leaders of the U.S. biomedical community are applauding the prospect of soon having a successor to Francis Collins, who stepped down in December 2021. Researchers had fretted as several candidates reportedly on the short list for the job dropped out, and the lack of a permanent NIH leader for the past 16 months has weakened the agency’s ability to respond to harsh criticism from congressional Republicans about its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The choice of Bertagnolli “is a terrific solution to the delays that the administration was facing in having to convince someone to work in Washington,” says cancer researcher Harold Varmus, a Nobel laureate and the only person to have run both NCI and NIH. “She’d already agreed to work in Washington. I...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news