Clinical Research is my Moonshot (Keynote)

Alicia Staley serves as vice president of Patient Engagement at Medidata where she leads the Patient Insights Program. She works to infuse the patient perspective throughout the product development lifecycle and help engage patients in novel ways. She created Patient Centricity by Design (PCbD) in 2018 as a way to provide structure and governance for developing patient-centric technical solutions. 

Alicia has over 20 years of experience in software design and information systems management.  She  is also a three-time cancer survivor, first diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease as a sophomore during college.  As a champion of patient advocacy and engagement, she understands the critical issues facing patients seeking to engage in clinical research. 

She is the 2022 Patient Advocate award winner of the Ellen L. Stovall Award for Innovation in Patient-Centered Cancer Care given by the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship. In 2019, Alicia won the eyeforpharma Patient Champion award winner for her extensive patient advocacy and engagement work. She truly understands the critical issues facing patients seeking to engage in clinical research. In 2021, Alicia won the CHI SCOPE Participant Engagement award for her work on Medidata’s Patient Centricity by Design initiative. Leveraging the classic design thinking framework, Alicia and her team developed a methodology for surfacing key insights from a patient’s clinical trial journey and transforming those insights into software development elements. 

She has co-led numerous research studies on how patients share information in online forums and has published numerous research papers on patient engagement and the need for patient-centric approaches to the design and development of clinical trials. Alicia earned a Mechanical Engineering Degree from Syracuse University, a Masters of Information Systems, and an MBA from Boston University.

As the Global Practice Leader of Executive Communications at Real Chemistry, Mike Huckman is changing the way healthcare leaders communicate. Mike spent nearly three decades working as an Emmy Award-winning TV reporter, the last 10 years of his journalism career at CNBC, where he was the first-ever broadcast business correspondent assigned exclusively to covering the life sciences. At CNBC, he earned a reputation as a reliable source of breaking biopharma news and a go-to interviewer of CEOs and other executives across the healthcare sector. In 2010, Mike began his second career as a trusted advisor and communications coach for senior leaders in the life sciences. Over the last 14 years, Mike has partnered with hundreds of clients to change the way they convey science, technology and healthcare ingenuity and advancements to achieve better comprehension and greater impact. When he is not on Zoom or traveling to meet with clients, Mike spends time with his husband John and their dog Remy at their home in Wilmington, NC. He is a longtime spin instructor, runner, yoga enthusiast and more recently a pickleball addict. Mike is proud to have been part of the Timmerman Traverse earlier this year that climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro and raised more than $1 million for cancer research. In 2022, the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) elected Mike to its Board of Directors. He is a 1983 broadcast journalism graduate of the University of Southern California. Mike is an avid Trojans fan and joins us after attending the USC-Michigan game just last weekend in Ann Arbor!