FDA Scientific Achievement Award - Chief Scientist Publication Award for Significant Outreach

Silver Spring, Maryland, November 2023

[image: receiving the award from Dr. Califf]

This one still feels surreal to write about. I was honored with the Chief Scientist Publication Award for Significant Outreach, presented by Robert M. Califf, M.D., Commissioner of Food and Drugs, as part of the FDA's Scientific Achievement Awards. It's an agency-wide honor, and receiving it directly from the Commissioner himself was one of the greatest scientific accomplishments of my career to date.

The award recognized our paper, "Evaluation Challenges for the Application of Extended Reality Devices in Medicine," published in the Journal of Digital Imaging, which grew directly out of the 2020 FDA public workshop I helped organize and present at. It summarized the key technical and clinical evaluation challenges discussed during that workshop, and outlined future directions for evaluating medical XR devices. I got to share this recognition with the same group I'd worked alongside for years on MXR research: Ryan Beams, Ellenor Brown, Wei-Chung Cheng, Janell Joyner, Kimberly Kontson, and Aldo Badano.

It meant a lot to see a project that started as a single workshop turn into a publication that the agency recognized at this level- and to know that the research our small group has been pushing forward for years is making a real impact.

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