Home Appointments Acting Commissioner
Acting Commissioner
US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
| Appointee | Janet Woodcock |
|---|---|
| Role | Acting Commissioner |
| Organisation | US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) |
| Domain | Health Regulatory |
| Start | 21 January 2021 |
| End | 18 February 2021 |
| Notes | First woman to serve as FDA Commissioner (acting) |
Institutional context
The Food and Drug Administration is the principal United States regulator of medicines, biologics, medical devices, food, tobacco, and several other product categories. The Commissioner is the senior officer of the agency. The position is presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed; in periods between confirmed Commissioners, an Acting Commissioner serves. Through 2021, every permanent Commissioner was male. Woodcock is the first woman to lead the agency in any capacity, in her acting role.
Career path
Woodcock holds a BS in chemistry from Bucknell (1970) and an MD from Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine (1977). She joined the FDA in 1986 and served in a series of senior positions, most consequentially as Director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) from 1994 to 2004 and again from 2007 to 2021 — the largest centre at the agency. She also served as Deputy Commissioner for Operations and Chief Operating Officer of the FDA from 2005 to 2007.
Appointment
She served as Acting Commissioner from 20 January 2021 — the start of the Biden administration — through 17 February 2022, when Robert Califf was confirmed by the Senate and took office as the permanent Commissioner. She subsequently served as Principal Deputy Commissioner from 18 February 2022 until 1 February 2024.
Tenure
Just under thirteen months as Acting Commissioner. The acting tenure spanned the most intensive phase of the COVID-19 vaccine and therapeutic deployment, with FDA staff under her direction completing emergency-use-authorization reviews of the major vaccine and therapeutic candidates.
Cluster context
Woodcock's acting tenure is recorded in the dataset because it is the first time, in any capacity, that a woman led the FDA. The FDA's permanent commissionership remains an institution where the first-woman event has not yet occurred, making it an internal counterexample within the regulatory-medical sub-cluster — present at the CDC and NIH, absent at the FDA.