Speaker's Profile

Dr. Susan Coller Monarez is a globally recognized leader with more than 20 years of experience in health innovation. Throughout her career, Monarez has focused on understanding the critical challenges within the health ecosystem and the greatest opportunities for innovation to meet these challenges. Prior to serving as ARPA-H deputy director, Monarez led innovation at the Health Resources and Services Administration, focused on ethical use of AI/ML to support improved health outcomes, novel approaches to addressing social determinants of health, expanding access to behavioral health, ending the opioid epidemic, addressing health equity gaps in maternal and infant mortality, and improving the country’s organ donation and transplantation programs.

Monarez has also served at the White House as the assistant director for National Health Security and International Affairs in the Office of Science and Technology Policy and as the director of Medical Preparedness Policy on the National Security Council. In both White House roles, she led efforts to enhance the nation’s biomedical innovation capabilities including combating antibiotic resistant bacteria and MDR/XDR TB, expanding telehealth and remote patient monitoring, establishing safeguards to ensure personal health data privacy, and improving pandemic preparedness. Monarez led the development of several Presidential-level national strategies, action plans, and policy directives related to domestic and global health.

Monarez also served in leadership positions at the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency within the Department of Homeland Security and the Biomedical Advanced Research Projects Agency within HHS. In addition to leadership roles within the federal government, Monarez has served on numerous advisory panels, including for the National Academies of Science, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Monarez has also served as the U.S. representative on several international cooperative initiatives including with the European Union, Canada, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom in bilateral and multilateral engagements.

Monarez was a Science and Technology Policy fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Prior to government service, Monarez was a postdoctoral fellow and graduate student, respectively, at Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin, where she focused on technology development to prevent, diagnose, and treat infectious diseases with a focus on people living in low- and middle-income countries.