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Ritu Nalubola
Leadership Role

Ritu Nalubola
Ritu Nalubola

Ritu Nalubola, Ph.D., is the Associate Commissioner for Policy. She assumed this new role in November 2024 moving from her previous position as the Deputy Director of the Office of Policy, Legislation, and International Affairs (OPLIA) in the Office of the Commissioner where she supported the Deputy Commissioner and OPLIA sub-offices to advance the FDA’s policy, legislative, and global programs, as well as engagements with Congress and global and domestic partners. 

Prior to these senior leadership positions in OPLIA, Dr. Nalubola served as the Director of the FDA’s Europe Office, advancing the priorities of both the FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in the region. She led an office that worked across three locations (in Brussels, embedded within the U.S. Mission to the European Union; in Amsterdam, embedded within the European Medicines Agency; and at FDA headquarters in White Oak, Maryland) in strengthening the safety and effectiveness of medical products and food produced in Europe for export to the United States.  Over the course of Dr. Nalubola’s five-year tenure, the FDA achieved transformative accomplishments in regulatory cooperation with its European and global partners in several areas, including biotechnology innovation; mutual recognition agreements between the United States, the EU, the U.K., and Switzerland; the illicit trade in health products; the shellfish equivalence arrangement; and digital health and related data governance. 

An FDA veteran of more than two decades, Dr. Nalubola also served as a senior policy advisor in the FDA’s Office of Policy where she led FDA’s efforts, in support of the broader U.S. government activities, to modernize the federal regulatory system for biotechnology products. She advised senior leadership at the FDA, HHS, and other U.S. government agencies on complex and crosscutting policy issues, including biotechnology, nanotechnology, food safety, nutrition, and trade-related matters. 

Dr. Nalubola started her career at the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition where she worked on a range of nutrition and food safety policy matters. She earned her doctorate in human nutrition, focusing on nutritional biochemistry, from Michigan State University. She conducted her postdoctoral work at Johns Hopkins University assigned to the U.S. Agency for International Development, where she was involved in setting up international public health programs.

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