Melinda Morton Hamer MD, MPH, FACEP
Deputy Director for Operations, Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs
Bio:
Melinda Morton Hamer MD, MPH is Deputy Director for Operations at Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs. She previously served on detail as a Senior Medical Advisor at BARDA’s Division of Research, Innovation and Ventures. She also served as Director of the Clinical Trials Center at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research from 2017-2021, where she provided oversight of clinical trials for new vaccines and drugs targeting a number of infectious diseases, including Zika virus, Ebolavirus, malaria, HIV, MERS, and others. She has served as a principal and associate investigator for more than 20 FDA regulated and other clinical trials, to include multiple first-in-human vaccine trials, and the largest in history controlled human malaria challenge trial.
She is also an active duty U.S. Army emergency physician, flight surgeon and a part-time Assistant Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the at the George Washington University. She is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Military and Emergency Medicine at the Uniformed Services University. She has significant career experience in the military and medical fields, as well as in academic research focusing on health policy, disaster medicine, and humanitarian response.
A West Point graduate, Dr. Hamer served in Hawaii, Egypt, and Washington DC in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks as a military police officer prior to attending medical school. While active duty, Dr. Hamer led security details and coordinated interagency disaster response planning for VIPs and special events at military bases in the Washington DC area.
Dr. Hamer was a Sommer Scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where she earned her MPH, and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. She has held multiple national board positions in the specialty of emergency medicine, and was selected as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar. Dr. Hamer is also the author of official U.S. Government and Institute of Medicine reports on health care reconstruction efforts in Iraq, and over 41 publications. She has conducted emergency medicine and disaster research in Iraq, Sudan, Uganda, Ghana, and Senegal, and was faculty for the 2011 World Health Organization Public Pre-Deployment Course in Hammamet, Tunisia.