Greg Simon has held senior positions in both chambers of Congress, served in two Presidential administrations, was a senior strategy consultant to a variety of international technology CEOs, co-founded (with Michael Milken) and led, FasterCures, co-founded and led the Melanoma Research Alliance, was the Senior Vice President at Pfizer for Worldwide Policy and Patient Engagement, and was the CEO of Poliwogg, a financial services company creating unique capital market opportunities and indexes in healthcare and life sciences. He has a reputation as a visionary strategist, a dynamic public speaker and writer, and as an expert analyst of emerging trends in healthcare, information technology, innovative drug research and development, and patient advocacy.
Most recently, Greg was the President of the Biden Cancer Initiative, a nonprofit formed by Vice President Joe Biden and Dr. Jill Biden to continue the work of the White House Cancer Moonshot to double the rate of progress in preventing, detecting, diagnosing, treating, and surviving cancer. He came to that position after serving as the Executive Director of the White House Cancer Moonshot Task Force established by President Barack Obama and led by Vice President Biden. Greg and his team helped launch over seventy innovative private and public-private collaborations and numerous novel interagency and international initiatives that helped support the successful effort to secure $1.8 billion in new funding for the Cancer Moonshot.
Greg came to Washington, DC in 1985 as General Counsel and then Staff Director of the Investigations Subcommittee of the House of Representatives’ Science, Space, and Technology Committee. During his years with the Science Committee, Greg organized a series of the earliest investigatory hearings on biotechnology policy and was involved in hearings and investigations related to NASA and the Challenger explosion, scientific misconduct, neurotoxins in the environment, the use of human biological materials in research and the artificial heart program.
Greg served as Sen. Al Gore’s Legislative Director from 1991 to 1993 before joining him in the White House in 1993 as his Chief Domestic Policy Advisor. He was the lead staffer for the Clinton-Gore Administration for development and passage of the Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996 as well as the development of the National and Global Information Infrastructure initiatives. He represented the Vice President on the National Economic Council, helped negotiate the US-Russia agreement on the International Space Station and oversaw a number of key health and science initiatives, including programs at the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Human Genome Project. He was also instrumental in crafting the regulatory framework that is now the foundation for the biotechnology industry.
Following his White House service Greg was CEO of Simon Strategies and provided strategic advice to CEO’s of major international firms such as Sony, Cisco, Netscape, Motorola, Sega, and AOL.
In 2003, Greg was the co-founder (with Michael Milken) and the founding President of FasterCures/The Center for Accelerating Medical Solutions, an independent, nonpartisan organization that is a center of the California-based Milken Institute. There he led efforts to reform policies governing biopharmaceutical discovery and development, with the goal of bringing a greater number of lifesaving medicines more quickly to doctors and patients.
From 2009 to 2012, Greg was SVP for Worldwide Policy and Patient Engagement at Pfizer and headed their Worldwide Policy group. He led a global team of professionals in: 1) worldwide government policy, 2) science policy, 3) economic policy and research, and 4) international policy. He advised the CEO on the company’s efforts in contributing to and supporting the Affordable Care Act. He focused on engaging patients more productively in research and clinical trials and on helping Pfizer develop policies, practices, and medical solutions to improve health, happiness, and productivity.
The journal Nature Medicine named Greg one of “Ten People to Watch” in health care policy, noting that he was among “a handful of influential people who quietly keep the wheels of biomedical science turning”. In 2010 he received the Genetic Alliance’s Art of Advocacy award. In 2011, Greg was invited to be the second lecturer in the Constantin Spiegelfeld Lecture series of the Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He is a regular presenter at the Milken Institute Global Conference, the OECD, the Washington Campus (a nonprofit educational institution in Washington, D.C.) and at health conferences and academic institutions around the country.
In 1994, Greg was invited by William Gates, Sr., to be the inaugural speaker in the Shidler, McBroom, and Lucas & Gates Lectureship in Law and Technology at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he spoke on the relationship of digital and genetic information technologies.
In 2004, Greg received the Sharon Nelson Achievement Award from the Shidler Center for Law, Commerce, and Technology at the University of Washington in Seattle.
In 2000, Greg was invited by the State Department under its expert program to visit government officials and citizens groups throughout the European Union to discuss the development of biotechnology regulation in the United States. In 1989, Greg won a fellowship to visit European Community Commission offices and government officials in London, Rome, and Madrid to discuss biotechnology.
He received his law degree from the University of Washington in 1983 where he was a member of the Law Review and the Moot Court. He has a B.A. in history from the University of Arkansas and studied at the Institute for European Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria.