Carla Rodriguez-Watson | Director of Research
Reagan Udall Foundation for the F.D.A.

Dr. Carla Rodriguez-Watson is the Director of Research for the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the FDA. Dr. Rodriquez-Watson is focused on continuously developing and enhancing a portfolio of work that leverages real-world data and experiences to inform and conduct clinical and post-market drug safety and effectiveness studies to improve population health. Projects include those focused on developing and advancing frameworks and tools to systematically describe and improve data sources and methods for use in pre- and post-market studies of product safety and effectiveness. Such tools can be leveraged directly to support the design and execution of regulatory studies conducted by the Innovation in Medical Evidence, Development and Surveillance (IMEDS) Program - a network of healthcare systems that advance the use of regulatory science tools and approaches, particularly those developed by the FDA’s Sentinel Initiative. Dr. Rodriguez-Watson sees data as a means for addressing unmet need. The portfolio of work includes a growing number of projects to gather and improve data to better describe disease distribution, medical product utilization, and to identify health risks and outcomes across all subpopulations and species.  Dr. Rodriguez-Watson brings her extensive background in public health surveillance and health outcomes research to this work. She earned her doctoral degree in Epidemiology from the University of Washington School of Public Health, her master’s degree in Public Health from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, and her bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University.