Vaccine Committee Leader Moves On

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) today announced the appointment of Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., as chief science officer for the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, the HHS's in-house think tank, providing policy advice to the Secretary.

Kulldorff is a biostatistician and epidemiologist with more than 200 peer-reviewed publications.

"Martin Kulldorff transformed ACIP from a rubber stamp into a committee that delivers gold-standard science for the American people," HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said in a press release on December 1, 2025.

He recently chaired the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and previously taught at Harvard Medical School.

Before his leadership on ACIP, Kulldorff helped build the CDC and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) vaccine and drug safety surveillance systems by developing new statistical and epidemiological methods for the Vaccine Safety Datalink and Sentinel systems. He served on the FDA Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee and on the ACIP COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Technical Work Group.

The ACIP committee is scheduled to meet for two days later this week under new leadership. The agenda for Thursday's meeting focuses on the Hepatitis B vaccine.