Elisa Eiseman, Ph.D.

Senior Natural Scientist
RAND Infrastructure, Safety, and Environment

Elisa Eiseman (Ph.D., Human Genetics, Medical College of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University, 1989) is a Senior Natural Scientist at the RAND Corporation. Her expertise is in genetics, cancer research, biotechnology, biomedicine, and bioethics. She has worked extensively on the issue of research involving human tissues and has written two major reports on the subject – the first report provided an inventory of human tissue resources in the United States, and the second report established best practices for the collection, storage, and distribution of human tissues for research purposes. She also has led a number of projects dealing with the protection of human research participants, and the ethics of new biomedical technologies, including cloning and stem cells. In addition, Dr. Eiseman has conducted research on the federal research and development portfolio, global healthcare resource tracking, and preparedness for public health emergencies. She has also assisted federal agencies with program-level strategic planning and evaluation processes using logic modeling as a planning tool.

Dr. Eiseman was an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Technology Policy Science and Engineering Fellow at the RAND Science and Technology Policy Institute from 1996 to 1998. Before coming to RAND, Dr. Eiseman was a senior scientist at Cell Therapeutics, Inc., a Seattle-based biotechnology company, where she was involved in cancer research and several aspects of drug development. Prior to that, she was employed with Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceutical Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey. Dr. Eiseman was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute.