As director of the University of Rochester’s Center for Health and Technology (CHeT), Dr. Heatwole leads a 100 person, six-unit, academic clinical research organization dedicated to advancing human therapeutics, health, and knowledge though skillfully conducted research, exceptional people, and global partnerships.  Within CHeT, Dr. Heatwole facilitates the conduct, planning, management, implementation, analysis, and rescuing of numerous multi-center clinical research studies.  Simultaneously, Dr. Heatwole’s internationally recognized research group develops, validates, and licenses innovative technologies and outcome measures to improve how research is conducted and how therapies are evaluated.  His long-standing research interest is in the development, testing, and discovery of novel and transformative neurological therapeutics and the generation and validation of highly sensitive, clinically relevant, disease-specific instruments for use in clinical trials and FDA drug labeling claims. Dr. Heatwole has been involved in the planning and implementation of numerous investigator-initiated therapeutic studies and has developed over 250 disease-specific instruments and >2000 subscales in >40 different languages.  These instruments are extensively used globally to measure therapeutic gain during therapeutic trials, have been shown to be more sensitive than traditional patient reported outcome measures in detecting therapeutic gains, and have been used in a pivotal study leading to a FDA drug approval for a novel neurological treatment.  Through his research, he has developed sophisticated methodologies and novel mathematical algorithms that are incorporated into all of the outcome measures to optimize their clinical meaningfulness, responsiveness, and utility for drug labeling applications.  These instruments are extensively licensed for use in academic initiated trials, pharmaceutic sponsored trials, government initiated trials, and as clinical markers of disease burden.  Additionally, these instruments facilitate international collaboration and multinational studies by allowing patients to be precisely characterized and compared globally.  Through his joint appointment at the Center for Health and Technology and the Department of Neurology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, Dr. Heatwole also guides an international multi-faceted research and operations center dedicated to harnessing state-of-the-art technologies and advancing research and clinical care through improved clinical trial infrastructure.