Solomon Iyasu

Dr. Solomon Iyasu is Vice President and Head of Pharmacoepidemiology at Center for Observational and Real-World Evidence (CORE) of MSD. Dr. Iyasu joined Merck and Co. in August of 2015 as Vice President and Global Head of Pharmacoepidemiology, Center for Observational and Real-World Evidence (CORE). He leads that department that is responsible for the design and conduct of postapproval observational safety and effectiveness studies of pharmaceutical products, real-world data analytics to characterize disease epidemiology, inform clinical trial design and clinical endpoint strategy. He also plays a key role in supporting initiatives to foster patient focused medical product development and to analyze health related big data to produce medical evidence for decision making by policy makers. Prior to joining Merck, Dr. Iyasu served as the Director of the Office of Pharmacovigilance and Epidemiology (OPE), in the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) at the USFDA. During his 13-year USFDA career, he is credited with building CDER’s regulatory epidemiology program and vastly increasing the role of epidemiological data in regulatory decision making regarding drug safety. Additionally, he greatly enhanced CDER’s epidemiology infrastructure and expertise to enable full support of the FDA’s Sentinel Initiative, the largest distributed healthcare data analytics infrastructure. Prior to the USFDA, he served at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) leading reproductive, perinatal and reproductive health epidemiology and outcomes studies. He has published many research papers and book chapters pertaining to pharmacoepidemiology, pharmacovigilance, regulatory policy, population health, perinatal and reproductive health. Dr. Iyasu received his medical training at the University of Delhi, India and his Master of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins University and a Preventive Medicine Residency at the CDC in Atlanta, Ga, USA.