Anita Cicero, JD

Chief Operating Officer and Deputy Director

Publications | Ms. Cicero in the News

Ms. Cicero joined the Center in early 2010 as Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer. Working with the CEO, she directs operations, strategic and budget planning, and program development at the Center. Since her arrival at the Center, she has helped to expand its initiatives in the realms of nuclear preparedness and detection and response to international disease epidemics. In collaboration with the Nuclear Threat Initiative, she recently provided strategic and governance advice for the creation of CORDS, a new international organization dedicated to improving global infectious disease detection and response by linking regional disease surveillance networks.

Ms. Cicero has nearly 2 decades of experience as a practicing attorney in both the U.S. federal government and the private sector. Before joining the Center, Ms. Cicero served as the Managing Partner in charge of the Washington, DC, office of Drinker, Biddle & Reath, LLP, where she was responsible for more than 300 lawyers and staff.

At Drinker Biddle, she formed and managed a range of biopharmaceutical consortia focused on scientific, regulatory, and policy issues, through which she acquired considerable skills in structuring consensus approaches to complex regulatory and scientific challenges. Her work in that realm required collaboration with members of Congress, the World Health Organization, the European Commission, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; the U.S. Departments of State, Defense, and Health and Human Services, and the Environmental Protection Agency. On behalf of her clients, Ms. Cicero led a number of major initiatives related to compliance with international environmental treaty mandates, international data protection and security laws, and human subject research protections for clinical trials.

In the realm of biosecurity, Ms. Cicero managed a consortium of companies that focused on advancing public policy to foster research and development of medical countermeasures. Among its accomplishments, the consortium provided invited analysis to the U.S. government on strategy and organizational capacity and developed recommendations for advancing the science of efficacy studies for countermeasures in the absence of human subject data.

Before entering private practice, Ms. Cicero focused on environmental litigation and counseling. As a trial attorney in the Honors Program at the U.S. Department of Justice, Environmental Enforcement Section, Ms. Cicero represented the EPA in civil litigation under the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act.

Ms. Cicero is a graduate of the Yale Law School and Oberlin College.