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Michele J. Orza, ScD, is the Chief of Staff at the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). Before PCORI, she was a principal policy analyst at the National Health Policy Forum focused on evidence-based health practice and policy, public health infrastructure and systems, global health, and health science and technology. Previously, Orza was a scholar at the Institute of Medicine (IOM) with the Board on Global Health, where she served as study director for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) Evaluation. While at the IOM, she also served as acting director of the Board on Health Care Services. Prior to that, she served as assistant director of the Health Care Team at the Government Accountability Office, where she was responsible for managing study teams evaluating a wide range of federal health programs.

For several years, she also served as director of science and research at the American College of Cardiology, where her department was responsible for supporting the college’s evidence-based medicine activities. Before coming to Washington, DC, Orza worked as a research assistant in the Technology Assessment Group at the Harvard School of Public Health on a wide variety of methods for and applications of systematic reviews and meta-analysis and other tools to promote and support evidence-based public health. Orza has served as a member of the Advisory Board to the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Policy and Healthcare Transformation, as consumer representative on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Drug Advisory Committees, and on committees at the National Academy of Medicine.

Orza earned both her master’s degree and doctorate in health policy and management with a focus on biostatistics, technology assessment, and program evaluation from the Harvard School of Public Health and received the first BA degree in women’s studies from Harvard/Radcliffe University.