Debra R. Lappin

Debra R. Lappin
President, Council for American Medical Innovation

Debra Lappin is recognized across government, academic and non-profit sectors as a public servant and leading strategist in public health and science policy. She serves as president to the Council for American Medical Innovation, an organization that brings together leaders in research, medicine, public health, academia, education, labor and business who are working in partnership toward a national policy agenda that preserves U.S. leadership in medical innovation.

As a senior vice president at B&D Consulting, Debra consults on innovative public-private partnerships and other alliances to drive translation research and public health promotion and prevention. Calling upon her experiences as former national chair of the Arthritis Foundation, she is a recognized national spokesperson on public engagement in the nation's public health and scientific enterprise.

Debra's practice focuses on the increasingly influential role of non-profit patient organizations as partners with government in research, development and prevention, where she orchestrates coalitions, global consortia, and other strategic alliances among academic research institutions, voluntary health agencies, government and industry. Areas of focus for such collaborative agreements have included work with the leading causes of disability, Arthritis and Alzheimer's disease, and rare diseases, such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Most recently, she has orchestrated science policy campaigns on issues of open access and genetic non-discrimination.

Drawing upon her understanding of health agency trends, law, ethics, and practical business challenges, she advises on the development of a broad range of emerging, complex tools to enable translation, such as disease registries, large integrated databases, bio-specimen repositories and cross-institution affiliations to share data.

Debra serves or has served as an advisor to the leading agencies in public health, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, and has participated on a number of committees at the National Academy of Sciences, including the Committee on the Organizational Structure of the NIH which led to a number of directions incorporated in the 2006 NIH Reform Act. She is a member of the board of Research!America and is a adjunct professor at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.