WASHINGTON – The FDA Office of Minority Health and Health Equity (OMHHE) is pleased to announce that Cheryl Anne Boyce, Ph.D., has been named the Associate Commissioner for Minority Health and Director of the Office of Minority Health and Health Equity (OMHHE) in the Office of the Commissioner at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In this role, Dr. Boyce will guide OMHHE and the FDA’s minority health and health disparity initiatives while leading collaborative strategic initiatives that advance health equity.
Dr. Boyce comes to the FDA from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where she served as Assistant Director for Re-engineering the Research Enterprise, Office of Strategic Coordination – The Common Fund, Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives. In this role she was involved with multiple transformative, translational, synergistic NIH programs for reengineering clinical research and the workforce.
At NIH, Dr. Boyce oversaw several programs in the Common Fund, including the Transformative Research to Address Health Disparities and Advance Health Equity initiative, which consisted of 16 collaborative agreements designed to increase the competitiveness of investigators and expand the research base dedicated to health disparities research, including low-resourced institutions and Minority-Serving Institutions. She also led the development and implementation of the Common Fund’s Community Partnerships to Advance Science for Society (ComPASS) program, a first-of-its-kind community-led and community-driven initiative.
Dr. Boyce served in other leadership capacities at NIH, including as the first permanent chief of the Implementation Science Branch, where she led innovative strategies to advance implementation research for heart, blood, lung, and sleep and evidence-based guidelines used in practice. Before that, she was the Associate Director of the Division of Epidemiology, Services, and Prevention Research at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Earlier, she was the Chief of the Behavioral and Brain Development Branch and Associate Director for Child and Adolescent Research in the Division of Clinical Neuroscience and Behavioral Research at NIDA. She held several roles at the National Institute of Mental Health, including Associate Director for Pediatric Translational Research Training and Career Development. She has also served since 2010 as a Commissioner on the Mayor of the District of Columbia’s Advisory Committee on Child Abuse and Neglect.
Dr. Boyce has lectured and published numerous scholarly articles on diverse topics. A well-respected scholar in her field, she has been recognized many times at NIH with various awards, both individually and as a team member.
Dr. Boyce received a doctorate and master’s degree in clinical psychology from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a bachelor’s, cum laude in psychology, with University Honors in social science from The Catholic University of America.
