NIH Record - National Institutes of Health

ORWH Welcomes New Deputy Director

Dr. Ota Wang stares into the camera. Her long black hair mostly covers her blue top. A white model sits in the left foreground.
Dr. Vivian Ota Wang

The NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH) has named Dr. Vivian Ota Wang as deputy director. 

Ota Wang’s background in genomics, psychology, ethics and data science will help to further drive innovative ideas and solutions to advance and improve the health of all women.   

She comes to ORWH from the Office of Data Sharing Strategy in the Division of Program Coordination, Planning and Strategic Initiatives. In her previous role, she was responsible for ethics, equity and issues related to data access and sharing policy development and implementation and Covid activities.

Ota Wang established the NIH Covid Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx®) Data Repository in December 2022. The repository represents one of the largest publicly accessible NIH databases for Covid-19 data in the nation and is considered a gold standard for data management, harmonization and sharing.  

In addition, she serves as a subject matter expert in ethics, community engagement, sovereignty, data governance and research participant protections. Her more recent activities include consulting for the National Covid Cohort Collaborative tribal consultation and leading the NIH Tribal Consultation for the RADx Tribal Data Repository, the first NIH-funded, tribally directed and sovereignty-based research data repository for RADx American Indian/Alaska Native research data.  

She also served as the inaugural deputy director of the Office of Data Sharing in the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology at the National Cancer Institute. Additionally, she was the program director for Data Access and Sharing and the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications Research Program at the National Human Genome Research Institute.  

Ota Wang received a B.A. in biology from Colorado College, an M.S. in genetic counseling from the University of Colorado, and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Columbia University. She is a fellow of the American Medical Association (American College of Medical Genetics) and American Psychological Association, diplomate of the American Board of Medical Genetics and American Board of Genetic Counseling, a clinical laboratory specialist in cytogenetics, and a licensed psychologist. 

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