Robert Califf

Five years after leaving his position as head of the FDA, Califf began his second stint leading the agency last February with a mission to restore public confidence in its approval process for drugs and vaccines. A key to success, Califf has said, will be lessons he learned as the former head of clinical policy and strategy at Verily, the life sciences arm of Google parent company Alphabet, which taught him about how people consume information, using easily understood words and reiterating messages about scientific consensus. Califf also wants to replace small clinical trials that provide little useful data with larger trials that draw help from community medical groups for faster, more diverse patient recruitment. If trials better reflect the potential patient population, he argues, they will produce data that more accurately reflect real-world conditions and thus help improve care.