Dr. Freda Lewis-Hall is the former executive vice president & chief medical officer at Pfizer. Trained as a psychiatrist, she has held leadership roles in academia, medical research, front-line patient care, and at global biopharmaceutical companies including Vertex, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Eli Lilly. Prior to her work in industry, she led research projects for the National Institutes of Health and was vice chairperson of the Department of Psychiatry at Howard University College of Medicine.
In 2010, Dr. Lewis-Hall was appointed by the Obama Administration to the inaugural Board of Governors for the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) and, in 2012, she was appointed chair of the Cures Acceleration Network Review Board and a member of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) Advisory Council of the National Institutes of Health. She also serves on the executive committee of the Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative and on numerous other boards, including those of Harvard Medical School, The Institute of Medicine's Forum on Drug Discovery, Development, and Translation, and Save the Children.
Dr. Lewis-Hall received a Bachelor of Arts and Sciences from Johns Hopkins University and her Medical Doctorate from Howard University Hospital and College of Medicine. Dr. Lewis-Hall was named one of Savoy's Top Influential Women in Corporate America in 2012, and was selected as the Healthcare Businesswomen's Association’s 2011 "Woman of the Year."
Conversations with Mike Milken
As a young African American girl growing up in the early 1960s, Freda Lewis-Hall was accustomed to people telling her that she would never attain her dream of becoming a doctor. Today, she can look back at a 35-year career that included serving as Pfizer’s Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer, where she was a passionate advocate for health equity and improved outcomes for all patients.
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