WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden will appoint Monica Bertagnolli, director of the National Cancer Institute, to lead the National Institutes of Health, the White House said on Monday.
Bertagnolli will become the second woman to serve as a permanent director of the NIH after a yearlong search to find a permanent replacement for the agency’s long-serving leader, Francis Collins.
“Dr. Bertagnolli is a world-class physician-scientist whose vision and leadership will ensure NIH continues to be an engine of innovation to improve the health of the American people,” Biden said in a statement.
Bertagnolli was appointed in October to head the National Cancer Institute, which is a part of NIH, and also served as head of surgical oncology at the Dana-Farber Brigham Cancer Center, one of the nation’s top cancer research facilities.
NIH, which began as a one-room hygienic laboratory in 1887, is a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services with a budget of about $45 billion in 2022.
Collins, who led NIH for 12 years, stepped down from that role in late 2021. Lawrence Tabak has been performing the director duties since December of that year after previously holding the roles of principal deputy director and deputy ethics counselor since 2010 at NIH.
In December, Bertagnolli announced that she had been diagnosed with early stage breast cancer and would need surgery and possibly additional treatment, but added that the prognosis was very favorable.
(Reporting by Doina Chiacu; editing by Rami Ayyub)
