Health Science Center President Named to FDA Committee

Nancy W. Dickey, M.D., president of The Texas A&M System Science Center and vice chancellor for health affairs for the A&M System, has been appointed to the Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Dickey is one of 11 physicians named to the committee by FDA Commissioner Mark B. McClellan, M.D. The committee will be chaired by Dr. Linda C. Giudice, M.D., Ph.D., the chief of reproductive endocrinology and infertility for the Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics at the Stanford University Medical Center.
At the request of the FDA, the advisory committee reviews and evaluates data on the safety and effectiveness of marketed and investigational human drugs for use in the practice of obstetrics, gynecology and related specialties, and makes appropriate recommendations to the FDA.
“This is a great opportunity to participate in the process that made American medicine great,” said Dickey. “Oversight and input about safety and efficacy are important for advances in healthcare. I am happy to be a part of the process.”
While the committee is an existing FDA advisory committee, its entire membership had lapsed and it had not met for two years. One of the first issues the committee will examine is the issue of hormone therapy, which has come under increased attention with the release of several new studies questioning its safety and effectiveness.
The other 9 members of the committee are Leslie Gay Bernitsky, M.D., an urologist from Albuquerque, N.M.; Susan A. Crockett, M.D., a clinical assistant professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and director of maternity services at Christus Santa Rosa Hospital; Scott Shields Emerson, M.D., Ph.D, a professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Washington in Seattle; Michael Furman Greene, M.D., director of Maternaland Fetal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston; W. David Hager, M.D., a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine in Lexington, Ky.; Vivian Lewis, M.D., an associate professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology and director of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology at the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, N.Y.; George A. Marcones, M.D., M.S.C.E., a statistician and professor in the Division of Maternal-Fetal Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia; Valerie Montgomery Rice, M.D., a reproductive endocrinologist at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, Kans.; and Joseph Barney Stanford, M.D., M.S.P.H., an associate professor, Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
The Texas A&M University System Health Science Center provides the state with health education, outreach and research. Its five components located in communities throughout Texas are Baylor College of Dentistry, the College of Medicine, the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, the Institute of Biosciences and Technology and the School of Rural Public Health.