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PRIM&R Service Award

The PRIM&R Service Award was created by the PRIM&R Board of Directors in 2021 to recognize individuals who have provided significant timely or timeless service to the human subjects protections or animal care and use communities that are at the core of PRIM&R. That service could be in teaching, mentorship, innovation, leadership, engagement, program improvement, or research. The intention of the award is to recognize the many and varied ways that people can have a significant impact on the field—awardees may be recognized for their long-time commitment or for one-time innovations and projects, whether early in their careers or after a lifetime of service.
PRIM&R 2026 Service Award Winner
Heather Pierce, JD, MPH 202 PRIM6&R Service Award Winner

2026 Service Award Winner

Heather Pierce, JD, MPH

Senior Director for Science Policy and Regulatory Counsel, Association of American Medical Colleges PRIM&R is pleased to present Heather Pierce, JD, MPH, with the 2026 PRIM&R Service Award for being, in the words of her nominator, "a national leader and subject matter expert, a coalition builder to advance research." Heather is the Senior Director for Science Policy and Regulatory Counsel at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), where she has worked since 2010, advising member institutions on federal funding, research integrity, conflicts of interest, bioethics, and research security. She also served as AAMC's Acting Chief Scientific Officer from November 2023 to July 2024, and was the inaugural Director of Policy for the AAMC Center for Health Justice. Earlier in her career, she developed Convey, AAMC's global financial interest disclosure platform, which has since facilitated more than 450,000 disclosures across 70-plus organizations. This is a particularly meaningful year to recognize her. In February 2025, Heather served as lead plaintiff in a federal lawsuit that stopped a devastating $6.5 billion overnight cut to NIH-funded research, securing a court order the same day the cuts were set to take effect. The case wound its way through the federal court system and ended in victory for the research community when the Department of Justice declined to ask the Supreme Court to reverse its loss. In the months since, Heather has been a public voice for research amid thousands of NIH grant terminations, contributed to a Supreme Court amicus brief, and led the team behind new public resources tracking NIH funding, indirect costs, and the effects of shrinking training grants on the biomedical research workforce.
Heather's nominator credited her with "good judgement, common sense, and high EQ." Those qualities showed during her years on the PRIM&R Board of Directors, where she served from 2013 to 2018 before chairing the Board from 2018 to 2019. She currently chairs the Board of Directors of the Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs (AAHRPP) and will become its President and CEO on January 1, 2027. She also serves on the board of the National Association for Biomedical Research (NABR).
Heather is well known to the broader research community, in part because, as her nominator put it, she "will either know or find out the answer for anyone." She is a regular contributor to national media, including CNN, NPR, the New York Times, and STAT, and her scholarship appears in journals such as Science, Nature, JAMA, and the New England Journal of Medicine. She holds a JD from New York University School of Law and an MPH in Health Law from Boston University School of Public Health.
"There are few who have contributed to the PRIM&R community in the specific ways that Heather has," her nominator wrote. PRIM&R could not agree more. It is with great pleasure and immense gratitude for her devoted service to the research ethics and oversight community that PRIM&R presents Heather Pierce with the 2026 PRIM&R Service Award. Heather Pierce will receive the award at the 2026 PRIM&R Annual Conference, November 16–18, 2026, in Denver, Colorado.