Dr. Susan Monarez

Deputy Director at ARPA-H

Speaker

Dr. Susan Coller Monarez, the ARPA-H Deputy Director since January 2023, is a globally recognized leader in health innovation and technology research and development. Throughout her career, Monarez has focused on understanding the critical challenges within the health ecosystem and identifying opportunities for innovation to address them.

Prior to joining ARPA-H, Monarez led high-impact initiatives focusing on the ethical use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to support improved health outcomes, novel approaches to addressing affordability and accessibility in healthcare, expanding access to behavioral and mental health interventions, ending the opioid epidemic, addressing health disparities in maternal morbidity and mortality, and improving the country’s organ donation and transplantation programs.

Monarez served at the White House in the Office of Science and Technology Policy and on the National Security Council, leading efforts to enhance the nation’s biomedical innovation capabilities including combating antimicrobial resistance, expanding the use of wearables to promote patient health, ensuring personal health data privacy, and improving pandemic preparedness.

Monarez has also held leadership positions including serving as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Strategy and Data Analytics at the Department of Homeland Security and overseeing technology research portfolios at the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Biomedical Advanced Research Projects Agency. Monarez has served on the National Academies of Science, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Monarez has led numerous international cooperative initiatives to promote bilateral and multilateral health innovation research & development.

Monarez was a Science and Technology Policy fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Prior to government service, Monarez was a postdoctoral fellow and graduate student, respectively, at Stanford University School of Medicine and the University of Wisconsin, where she focused on technology development to prevent, diagnose, and treat infectious diseases particularly impacting people living in low- and middle-income countries.