The bestselling author and podcaster Malcolm Gladwell described him as one of the ten “most important Americans you’ve never heard of.” Dr. Michael Lauer served as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Deputy Director for Extramural Research from 2015 to 2025. He was the principal scientific leader and adviser to the NIH Director on all matters relating to the substance, quality, and effectiveness of the agency’s $38 Billion per year extramural research program. He is a board-certified cardiologist who trained at Albany Medical College, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital, the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Framingham Heart Study. Before coming to the NIH he was an academic cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic and Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology, and Statistics at Case Western Reserve University. His research focused on cardiovascular disease, the application of machine learning to medical data, and the nature of science. He has published more than three hundred scientific papers, including lead author papers that appeared in top journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and Lancet. From 2015 to 2025 he hosted the NIH Open Mike blog which had over 400,000 subscribers. He has been quoted by news outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Science magazine, and was featured in a widely heard 2020 Malcolm Gladwell podcast on the limitations of peer review. His numerous awards include the NIH Equal Employment Opportunity Award of the Year (2010), the Arthur S. Flemming Award for Exceptional Federal Service (2012) in recognition of my efforts to grow a culture of learning and accountability, and a Lifetime Achievement Award (2025) from the American Heart Association.

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