Aftin Ross, MSE, PhD
Aftin Ross, MSE, PhD
Senior Special Advisor
Food and Drug Administration, Center for Devices and Radiological Health
Dr. Aftin Ross is the Senior Special Advisor for emerging initiatives in the Office of Strategic Partnerships and Technology Innovation at FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH). In this role, she provides leadership and coordination within CDRH on a range of emerging public health issues including medical device cybersecurity, personal protective equipment (PPE), medical device sterilization, and incident response while helping to advance health equity. Aftin has had leadership roles in CDRH incident response to COVID-19, device-related infections, and natural disasters such as the 2017 Atlantic hurricanes. During COVID-19, she led and participated on teams responsible for increasing PPE access by mitigating PPE shortages, setting PPE policies, and communicating to the public. Aftin is contributing to CDRH’s strategic priority on health equity by helping to shape CDRH’s approach to collaborations and partnerships to increase health equity in device development and enhance health technology access. One of the ways to increase technology access for all patients, including those in underserved populations, is through digital technologies and the ability to provide telehealth services. To enable this access, medical devices need robust cybersecurity. Aftin is a lead in CDRH’s medical device cybersecurity efforts developing national and international cybersecurity policy, spearheading the execution of three FDA public workshops, supporting numerous cross-stakeholder efforts (e.g., the 2017 healthcare cybersecurity task force), and developing public communications to raise awareness of medical device cybersecurity. Currently, she is a member of the MedTech Color Collaborative Community, focusing on advancing the representation of people of color in medical device product development and clinical research. Aftin earned a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Maryland Baltimore County where she was a Meyerhoff Scholar. She completed her graduate work at the University of Michigan earning a master’s and Ph.D. in biomedical engineering. Then Aftin completed a post-doctoral fellowship as a Whitaker International Fellow in Karlsruhe, Germany. In 2016, she completed the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative, an executive education program in the Harvard School of Public Health and Kennedy School of Government and in 2019 she became a certified Six Sigma Green Belt. She has received numerous awards, including recognition from the FDA commissioner, for her work in medical device cybersecurity and incident response.