Arlene S. Bierman, M.D., M.S., is director of AHRQ’s Center for Evidence and Practice Improvement which consists of four divisions the Evidence-Based Practice Center Program; the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force Program; the Division of Health Information Technology and the Division of Practice Improvement and the National Center for Excellence in Primary Care Research. Dr. Bierman is a general internist, geriatrician and health services researcher whose work has focused on improving access, quality and outcomes of health care for older adults with chronic illness in disadvantaged populations and has published widely in these areas. Dr. Bierman has also developed strategies for using performance measurement as a tool for knowledge translation, as well as conducted research to increase policymakers’ uptake of evidence. As tenured professor she held appointments Health Policy, Evaluation, and Management; Public Health; and Medicine; and Nursing at the University of Toronto, where she was the inaugural holder of the Ontario Women's Health Council Chair in Women's Health and a senior scientist in the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute at St. Michael's Hospital. She was principal investigator for the Project for an Ontario Women’s Health Evidence-Based Report Card (POWER) study, which provided actionable data to help policymakers and health care providers improve health and reduce health inequities in Ontario. Dr. Bierman has served on many advisory committees including the Geriatric Measurement Advisory Panel of the National Committee for Quality Assurance, the boards of Health Quality Ontario, and the National Center of Excellence National Initiative for Care of the Elderly (NICE). She received her M.D. degree from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill where she was a Morehead Fellow. She completed fellowships in Outcomes Research at Dartmouth Medical School, and Community and Preventive Medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and also served as an Atlantic Philanthropies Health and Aging Policy Fellow/American Political Science Foundation Congressional Fellow.