Management Team

SHIH-YIN HO, M.D., M.B.A.
Vice President, Corporate Strategy

As Vice President of Corporate Strategy, Yin is responsible for the definition and management of Medidata's corporate strategy, including bringing together software, implementation, hosting and support services to address new and existing market segments and customer requirements.

Prior to joining Medidata, Yin spent close to seven years at Pfizer in senior management positions, including senior director for medical policy, worldwide public affairs and policy where she developed, defined and led global medical policy related to the practice of medicine, patient-physician relationships and physician-payer relationships, and senior director/team leader for health strategy, U.S. Pharmaceuticals division where she developed and led Pfizer's initiatives in eHealth. Yin has also held positions as senior consultant to the Board of Directors at GliaMed, a neuroscience biotechnology company, and director of business development at Emergingmed.com, an e-clinical trial company focused on cancer patient recruitment and advocacy.

Yin is a licensed physician in Connecticut and trained as an emergency medicine physician. She is affiliated with numerous associations, including the American Medical Association, American College of Emergency Physicians and the eHealth Initiative Leadership Council and has spoken extensively at conferences such as the Drug Information Association and National Association of Health Data Organizations.

Yin received her B.A. from Brown University in Chinese classics and biology, M.D. from Yale University School of Medicine, and M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

KEITH HOWELLS
Senior Vice President, Development

Keith manages the development team at Medidata Solutions, being responsible for both the core Rave product as well as for customer-specific integrations and utilities. In this role, Keith drives the innovation of new features and new technologies into Rave, while providing a smooth upgrade path for existing customers.

Keith has dedicated his efforts to the clinical trials business for over 15 years. In his prior position at Oracle, he helped to establish Oracle Clinical as the dominant back-end data management system, initially as head of the pharmaceutical consulting practice and then as vice president of the pharmaceutical applications development group. In this role, he led the development of products for clinical data management, clinical trials management, electronic data capture, medical dictionary management, pharmacovigilance and clinical data warehousing. The work entailed providing technical direction, supporting production customers, agreeing to a number of customer-funded product enhancements and leading two acquisitions. He also presented papers at a number of industry conferences, including various user group meetings and the annual conferences for the Drug Information Association and the Society for Clinical Data Management.

Keith's prior roles were in a variety of development, support and managerial positions at Exxon Corporation and Texas Instruments.

Keith holds a bachelors degree in physics from Oxford University, England.

PETER ABRAMOWITSCH
Vice President, Development, Trial Planning

As Vice President of Development for Trial Planning, Peter is responsible for the development of Medidata CRO Contractor, Medidata Designer and Medidata Grants Manager products.

Peter's experience includes more than 20 years of involvement in a number of ground-breaking software projects, including dynamically-driven telephone interviewing software (now owned by SPSS, and adopted by Gallup, Neilson and ORC); one of the first non-linear feature film editing systems developed at Lucas Films' Skywalker Ranch, the EditDroid; a sophisticated clinical monitoring system for the operating room developed in Italy and pioneered at several European hospitals.

Most recently, Peter served as chief technology officer and chief architect at Fast Track Systems, Inc., where he designed and directed the development of the TrialSpace Enterprise Architecture platform for interconnected clinical trial applications using a mixture of rich client and web technologies. Prior to his role at Fast Track, Peter served as senior software architect at Oacis Healthcare Systems, a vendor of HL7 based clinical repositories and applications.

A specialist in metadata driven software design, Peter is an active modeler and participant in the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) protocol representation activities. In addition, he is a guest speaker on rules-based clinical data modeling approaches at various clinical events, including the Drug Information Association (DIA) and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conferences, and is listed as a co-inventor on pending patent applications for innovations in this area.

Peter earned his B.A. in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley and M.A. in film production from the London International Film School.

RICHARD J. PIAZZA, MS, PharmaD
Vice President, New Products

As Vice President of New Products, Rick is responsible for the introduction, management, and implementation of new products into the clinical trials market and to assist in the definition of the Medidata product strategy.

Rick brings over 20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical and eClinical industries with a blend of management, scientific and technical expertise. Rick formerly held a range of senior management positions at etrials, a provider of software and services for clinical trials. Most recently, as part of the executive management team, Rick acted as vice president of product strategy where he was responsible for leading the development of the company's clinical trials commercial software applications, establishing the company's quality assurance program and implementing a formal software development lifecycle policy for software engineering. Prior to etrials, he served as associate director of clinical trials management at Health & Sciences Research, a full service contract research organization and clinical site, where he brought three major Phase III projects to NDA submission and product approval.

Rick's work has been published in leading journals such as the Drug Information Journal and Regulatory Affairs Focus. A featured presenter at key industry conferences, he is actively involved in the Drug Information Association (DIA) and was named to the 2006 PharmaVOICE 100 list of inspiring life sciences professionals.

Rick received his B.S. in Pharmacy from Rutgers University, College of Pharmacy, Masters in Pharmacotherapeutics from Long Island University and Doctorate of Pharmacy from Idaho State University College of Pharmacy.

ANDREW NEWBIGGING
Vice President, Integrations Development

With more than 15 years of healthcare and pharmaceutical IT experience, Andrew joined Medidata Solutions in the UK as senior director of research and development. As Vice President of Integrations Development, Andrew is responsible for Medidata's Integration Center of Excellence which is designed to deliver an enterprise-wide e-clinical suite based on industry standards. He brings extensive contract negotiation experience within public and private sectors, as well as broad business management and technical design expertise.

Previously, Andrew launched InferMed Limited, a UK company developing, marketing and supporting software products for health and life science organizations, where he was responsible for leading business development and technical strategies. Andrew has also served as principal consultant at Integral Solutions Limited, business systems analyst at University College London Hospitals and project leader at Price Waterhouse Management Consultants.

Andrew received his B.A. in Natural Sciences from Magdelene College and holds a Certificate of Proficiency in Structured Systems Analysis and Design Methodology (SSADM).