Eric Perakslis Appointed New CIO of FDA

October 10, 2011

By Bio-IT World Staff    

October 10, 2011 | Eric Perakslis, formerly Chief Information Officer (CIO) of R&D Information Technology at Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical R&D, has joined the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as the FDA’s new Chief Information Officer and Chief Scientist (Informatics).    

In an internal email sent by the FDA Commissioner last Friday announcing the Perakslis hire, Margaret Hamburg said that the agency was “enormously fortunate” to have been able to bring Perakslis into the fold.    

“The commissioner has given me license to bring positive change to the agency and I am looking to engage our scientific/technologic community openly to make good things happen,” Perakslis told Bio-IT World in a brief comment.    

Perakslis spent 13 years in all at J&J, where he also held the title of senior vice president and Head of Informatics for the Corporate Office of Science and Technology.    

Perakslis has experience building IT/informatics architectures uniting silos of data across sprawling organizations, helping design and implement tranSMART while at J&J/Centocor. That initiative won one of the Bio-IT World Best Practices Awards for 2010.    

An engineer by training, Perakslis’ chief interests at J&J focused on translational medicine and informatics with a specific focus on precompetitive data sharing, immunology, and oncology informatics, as well as open source systems globalization. He is also a kidney cancer survivor who is actively involved with prominent cancer organizations as a volunteer and active board member.     

In announcing the hire, Hamburg also thanked Stephen Veneruso for his stint as acting CIO, helping to establish “scientific enclaves [that] will provide the scientific community the ability to share data in a secure manner.”