PatientsLikeMe has appointed Jason Johnson, Ph.D., as executive vice president and head of R&D. Johnson leads the company's research, data science and informatics teams, which focus on analyzing and merging patient-reported and other data types to develop models of disease progression and generate new insights about disease, treatments and health. Johnson reports directly to CEO Martin Coulter.

"Jason comes to us at a time when the industry is putting patients at the center of healthcare, and using more patient-reported data to guide business and operational decisions," said Coulter. "Our research and informatics teams bring the data to life by extracting insight and meaning about the patient experience, and helping our partners see which medicines and therapeutic approaches will benefit patients the most. The combination of Jason's leadership and our scientifically-validated data will be a powerful source of insight to guide discovery, development and treatment decision making."

A renowned computational biologist and information science strategist, Johnson comes to PatientsLikeMe after spending 14 years at Merck, most recently as associate vice president for Scientific Informatics. In this role, Jason helped build Merck's informatics and analytics capabilities and was responsible for applied math and modeling, scientific computing and research software engineering. Johnson held various leadership roles during his tenure at Merck within R&D and information technology (IT), and led teams responsible for early clinical development and discovery research IT, computational biology, molecular profiling and genomics research. Previously, Jason worked at Rosetta Inpharmatics, a biotechnology company in Seattle, and at Pfizer.