President, Center for Medicine in the Public Interest
Advisor to Obama Administration FDA Transition Team
Former Associate Commissioner, US Food and Drug Administration
- Special Government Employee, FDA Risk Communications Advisory Committee
- Board of Advisors, Digital Health Council
- Editorial Advisory Board, Food and Drug Policy Forum
- Board of Advisors, New York State Health Foundation
- Washington Drug Letter, Editorial Advisory Board
- Briefings on Drug Safety, Editorial Advisory Board
- Advisory Board, Pharmaceutical Executive Magazine
- Advisory Board, MedAd News
- Editorial Advisory Board, The Patient Magazine
- Associate Editor, Drug Information Journal
- Scientific Advisory Council. Animal Health Institute
Peter Pitts is President of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest. From 2002-2004 A former member of the United States Senior Executive Service, Peter was FDA’s Associate Commissioner for External Relations, serving as senior communications and policy adviser to the Commissioner. He supervised FDA's Office of Public Affairs, Office of the Ombudsman, Office of Special Health Issues, Office of Executive Secretariat, and Advisory Committee Oversight and Management. He served on the agency’s obesity working group and counterfeit drug taskforce and is a Special Government Employee (SGE) consultant to the FDA’s Risk Communications Advisory Committee where he is advising the FDA on regulatory issues in the sphere of social media. Specific areas of global policy expertise include food safety and security, recalls, nutritional labeling, genetically modified food issues, drug safety, reimbursement policy, EBM/HST, DTC/ItP, Critical Path, Personalized Medicine, Clinical Trial Transparency, IP Protection, FDA Reform, Drug Importation, Counterfeiting.
In 2010, he was named by Modern Healthcare magazine as one of the 300 “most powerful people in American healthcare.” His comments and commentaries on health care policy issues regularly appear in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Health Affairs, The Boston Globe, The Washington Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Sun Times, The San Francisco Examiner, Investor’s Business Daily, The Baltimore Sun, The Economist, Nature Biotechnology, The Journal of Life Sciences the BBC World Service, Fox News, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, among others. His book, Become Strategic or Die, is widely recognized as a cutting edge study of how leadership, in order to be successful over the long term, must be combined with strategic vision and ethical practice. He is the editor of Coincidence or Crisis, a discussion of global prescription medicine counterfeiting and Physician Disempowerment: A Transatlantic Malaise. He has served as an adjunct professor at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs and Butler University. A graduate of McGill University, he is married to Jane Mogel, and has two sons.