NLM Director Patricia Flatley Brennan, RN, PhD, is pleased to announce the appointment of Teresa Zayas Cabán, PhD, as NLM’s Assistant Director for Policy Development. In this role, Dr. Zayas Cabán will lead NLM’s policy and legislative activities, which promote access to scientific data and information, as well as more widespread use of health data standards. 

Dr. Zayas Cabán comes to NLM from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) where she served as Chief Scientist and was responsible for leading ONC’s overall scientific efforts and activities. In this position, she developed, established, and recommended scientific policy to the National Coordinator, directed ONC’s precision medicine initiative activities, and provided oversight of ONC’s patient-centered outcomes research projects.

Prior to her position at ONC, Dr. Zayas Cabán was the Chief of Health IT Research and Acting Director of the Division of Health IT at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), where she set new directions for their funding opportunities and coordinated with federal partners, such as the National Science Foundation. Before joining AHRQ, she served as a post-doctoral trainee in the NLM-funded Computation and Informatics in Biology and Medicine Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dr. Zayas Cabán was previously on detail to NLM from July 2019 through September 2020, when she served as the Coordinator for Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) Acceleration. In this position, she was the principal architect for the NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science initiatives implementing the FHIR standard for research uses of clinical, molecular, and image data.

Dr. Zayas Cabán holds a doctorate in industrial and systems engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she was a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow in industrial engineering.

Last Reviewed: February 16, 2021