AFTIN ROSS

Senior Special Advisor for Emerging Initiatives –
Center for Devices and Radiological Health, US Food and Drug Administration

Aftin Ross is senior special advisor for emerging initiatives in the Office of Strategic Partnerships and Technology Innovation (OST) at the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH). In this role, she provides leadership and coordination within the Center on a range of emerging public health issues including medical device cybersecurity, respiratory protective devices, personal protective equipment (PPE), and incident response.

Regarding cybersecurity, she has been a lead in CDRH’s medical device cybersecurity efforts spearheading the execution of three FDA public workshops, serving on various interagency cybersecurity work groups, supporting numerous cross-stakeholder efforts (e.g. the 2017 healthcare cybersecurity task force), managing CDRH’s MITRE cybersecurity contract, supporting the development of international cybersecurity policy as a convener of the International Medical Device Regulators Forum (IMDRF), and engaging in policy development as a member of the CDRH cybersecurity workgroup.

Aftin earned a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Maryland Baltimore County where she was a Meyerhoff Scholar. She completed her graduate work at the University of Michigan earning a master’s and PhD in biomedical engineering. After her graduate work, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship as a Whitaker International Fellow at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany. In 2016, she completed the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative, an executive education program in the Harvard School of Public Health and Kennedy School of Government and in 2019 she became a certified Six Sigma Green Belt.