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Laura Lyman Rodriguez, PhD, is the Deputy Executive Director for Strategy & Planning at the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). She has focused her career on developing policies and partnerships to advance research for public benefit and create resources to inform patient-centered care options.

In her current role, Rodriguez leads enterprise-wide strategic initiatives, organizational policy development, and portfolio analyses to assure that research and program activities reflect stakeholder input, advance PCORI’s National Priorities for Health, and maintain PCORI’s commitment to being a learning organization. Through cross-cutting collaboration with all PCORI components she also ensures the integrated implementation of PCORI activities to achieve organizational objectives and sustain PCORI’s emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion in all activities. Finally, Rodriguez is responsible for establishing effective strategies to communicate with and educate the public, patients and their caregivers, policy makers, researchers, and other stakeholders about PCORI priorities and research outcomes.

Prior to joining PCORI, Rodriguez spent more than 16 years at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) where she focused much of her time developing approaches to integrate the ethical considerations and regulatory obligations inherent in genomic and health data sharing into responsible governance and access oversight systems for data science platforms. Nearly all her NIH tenure was with the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), where she served as the Director of the Division of Policy, Communications, and Education for over a decade. As genomic science advanced toward clinical applications, Rodriguez brought the activities under her purview together to engage and prepare researchers, healthcare providers, and patients for the realization of genomic information as a tool to improve health. During this time, Rodriguez was also a primary architect for the development and agency-wide implementation of NIH genomic data sharing policies. Before joining NHGRI, she spent time at the National Academy of Medicine, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, and on Capitol Hill.

Rodriguez earned a doctorate in cell biology from Baylor College of Medicine.