Debra R. Lappin, senior vice president of B&D Consulting, will give the NLM/MLA Joseph Leiter Lecture on Wednesday, May 14 from 1:30 to 3 p.m. in Lister Hill Auditorium, Bldg. 38A. Her talk is titled, “The 21st Century Patient – A New Partnership with the Biomedical Enterprise.”

Lappin is a current member of the advisory council to the director of the CDC and former co-chair of a national partners’ task force on partner and public engagement on CDC’s health protection goals. She was a member of NIH’s inaugural Council of Public Representatives, the NIAMS advisory council and the NLM PubMed central advisory council. She has participated on a number of committees at the National Academy of Sciences, including the committee on the organizational structure of the NIH, which directly informed the 2006 NIH Reform Act.

Lappin is a member of the board at Research!America, chairs the ethics committee at National Jewish Hospital and Research Center in Denver and is an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, where she lectures on biomedical ethics. She remains a director emeritus of the Arthritis Foundation, an organization she served as national chair from 1996 to 1998.

A reception follows the lecture, which will be webcast at http://videocast.nih.gov.

The NLM/MLA Joseph Leiter Lectureship was established in 1983 to stimulate intellectual liaison between the Medical Library Association (MLA) and the National Library of Medicine. Leiter was a major contributor in cancer research at the National Cancer Institute and a leader at NLM as a champion of medical librarians and an informatics pioneer.