Eric Peterson to Succeed Bob Harrington as Director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute

March 25th, 2012

Eric Peterson to Succeed Bob Harrington as Director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute

Larry Husten, PHD

The Duke Clinical Research Institute has announced that its new director will be Eric Peterson. The DCRI was founded by Robert Califf, who, as the director of the Duke Translational Medicine Institute (DTMI), will be Peterson’s boss. The DCRI’s second director, Robert Harrington, announced earlier this year that he was leaving Duke to become the chairman of the department of medicine at Stanford.

“Dr. Peterson’s accomplishments in clinical research and quality improvement over the past 20 years have prepared him well for this new responsibility,” said Califf, in the DCRI announcement. “Eric has demonstrated a special ability to expand the reach of the DCRI into areas of outcomes, comparative effectiveness, and implementation that perfectly complement the clinical trials focus of the past few decades, and he has done so by creating local, national, and international collaborations.”

Among his many current positions, Peterson is the director of the coordinating center for the NHLBI’s Centers for Cardiovascular Outcomes Research and principal investigator for the AHRQ Duke Center for Education and Research on Therapeutics (CERTs). Peterson came to Duke in 1992 as a cardiology fellow and has been on the faculty since 1995.

Peterson was early rumored to be the likely choice to succeed Harrington. Said Califf: “When Bob informed us of his decision to move to this major position at Stanford, Eric immediately rose to the top of the list of possible successors. In his interviews he showed that he will be ideally suited to lead a major effort to closely integrate the DCRI with the other components of the DTMI and the rest of Duke Medicine, while attending to the DCRI’s mission to promote novel clinical research on a global scale.”

Three Generations of DCRI Leadership: Rob Califf, Bob Harrington, and Eric Peterson

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March 25th, 2012