The Team
Who We Are
David A. Simon, J.D., LL.M., Ph.D
is the Clerk at HARMS and an Associate Professor of Law at Northeastern University School of Law, where he teaches courses on tort law, administrative law, and drug & device regulation. He is the Principal Investigator on The Project on Medical Device Safety, funded by Arnold Ventures. He is also a member of the UIUC CLASSICA research team, a project funded by the European Union. He has previously served on the faculties of Harvard Law School, George Washington University Law School, and the University of Kansas School of Law. Professor Simon’s research focuses on innovation in healthcare, with an emphasis on prescription drugs and devices. His work has appeared or will appear in a variety of publications, including the Texas Law Review, the Emory Law Review, the Georgia Law Review, the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, the Journal of Law & the Biosciences, JAMA, Nature Biotechnology and the Journal of Law, Medicine, & Ethics. A complete list of Dr. Simon’s publications is available on his CV.
Professor Simon has served on the law faculty at Harvard Law School, George Washington University School of Law, and the University of Kansas School of Law. During his time at Harvard Law School, he led a three-year project at Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics dubbed Diagnosing in the Home: The Ethical, Legal, and Regulatory Challenges and Opportunities of Digital Home Health, and funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
Hooman Noorchashm MD, PhD
is the President of HARMS and a physician-scientist, a globally recognized public health and patient safety advocate, and a Research Professor at Northeastern University School of Law.
Starting in 2013, Dr. Noorchashm has been focused on public health advocacy, patient safety and medical ethics in the medical device regulatory arena. He combines a rigorous academic-activist approach to identifying and advocating for sentinel anecdotes of patient harm, or medical device safety failures. Dr. Noorchashm has studied and called attention to several high-profile patient safety failures in the medical device regulatory system. His work has led to medical device recalls and changes in the standards of care that elucidate gaps or failures in the evidence-based approach to innovation in modern healthcare.
Michael Paasche-Orlow, MD, MA, MPH
is the Secretary at HARMS and a Professor of Medicine and Vice Chair for Research, Department of Medicine at Tufts Medical Center. As a primary care clinician and an internationally recognized expert in health services research, Dr. Paasche-Orlow has dedicated his career to improving the care of vulnerable populations. With over 250 peer-reviewed papers, his work has brought attention to the role that health literacy plays in racial and ethnic disparities, improving self-care for patients with chronic diseases, improving advanced care planning, designing information technologies to empower patients, and the safety of medical devices.