Hoffman, Andrew S. | USA

Andrew S. Hoffman is a PhD candidate (ABD) in the departments of Social Studies of Medicine and Sociology at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He received a Certificate in humanities and social sciences from the Universiteit van Amsterdam in the Netherlands and a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science/special honors (magna cum laude) from Hunter College of the City University of New York. Prior to commencing his doctoral studies at McGill, Andrew worked as a Research Data Coordinator on the leukemia service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, where he coordinated both regulatory and data portfolios for ongoing cancer clinical trials. His research is currently funded by two doctoral training fellowships: a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Strategic Training in Health Research fellowship in Health Care, Technology, and Place at the University of Toronto, as well as a CIHR Emerging Team Grant-funded fellowship through the APOGEE-Net/CanGèneTest Network, a Quebec-based organization which aims to support the development of evidence-informed health policies in the area of genetics and genomics.

Project at IAS-STS: Personalizing standards: Searching for synergy in comparative effectiveness research & personalized medicine

At IAS-STS, Andrew’s research will be generally focused on the advent of comparative effectiveness research in genomics and personalized medicine, which forms part of his ongoing dissertation entitled: ‘Personalizing Effectiveness?: Regulating Clinical Cancer Research and Practice in the Era of Genomics and Personalized Medicine.’ More specifically, he will be refining two sub-projects; one analyzing the articulation of qualitative and quantitative reasoning in a collaborative prioritization process for conducting comparative effectiveness-informed clinical trials in personalized cancer medicine, and the second which tracks the historical emergence of comparative effectiveness research and explores the multiple ways in which such data has been used in developing health technology assessments, using HTAs of genomic tools in cancer care as a case study.