People

Devon Gessert

University of Southern California Alzheimer’s Therapeutic Research Institute (USC ATRI)

Devon Gessert is the Director of Clinical Operations at USC’s Alzheimer’s Therapeutic Research Institute (ATRI) and the Director of the Clinical Operations Unit for the Alzheimer's Clinical Trials Consortium (ACTC).  She earned undergraduate degrees in Biology and Anthropology from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and a Certificate in Bioinformatics from the UCSD Extension.  

Ms. Gessert began her career in the Alzheimer’s Disease Cooperative Study’s (ADCS) Data Core in 2000, and has had the opportunity to work with a variety of groups from academia and industry across a spectrum of clinical research and in a variety of roles – in data management, software development and project management.  In her time with the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Laboratory at UCSD, she gained experience supporting and developing data capture systems in diverse therapeutic areas beyond Alzheimer's disease, including stroke, HIV, and multiple system atrophy.

As Director of Clinical Operations for the ADCS from 2008 to 2015, Ms. Gessert built and oversaw teams responsible for project management and data management and played a critical leadership role in helping the organization evolve into one that excelled in managing the full range of clinical studies from observational studies to early phase treatment trials to late phase registration trials sponsored by government agencies, pharmaceutical companies and public-private partnerships.  She has continued this work as the Director of Clinical Operations for the Alzheimer’s Therapeutic Research Institute (ATRI) since it was founded in 2015, building teams that have successfully transitioned into managing clinical studies with increasingly complex collaboration models, involving multiple academic groups, industry groups, CROs and vendors, in an ever-widening geographic range, currently extending from North America, to Europe, Australia, and Asia.