Valerie C Virta

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT VALERIE C VIRTA

Dr. Valerie Virta works in the Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration in the Office of Extramural Research at NIH. Previously, she worked on the Data Sharing Policies Implementation team, in the Immediate Office of the Director of the Office of Extramural Research at NIH.Prior to the Data Sharing Policies Implementation team, she served in the Division of Cardiovascular Science as the Deputy Chair of the Data Access Committee (DAC) for the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI). She worked on data science policy issues as an intramural and extramural Genomics Program Administrator in addition to reviewing Data Access Requests from scientists seeking to use large datasets hosted by NHLBI in their research. In addition, she worked on various data science and sharing policy issues on behalf of the NHLBI. Before NHLBI, Dr. Virta worked in the Small business Education and Entrepreneurial Development (SEED) office in the Office of Extramural Research. While there she was a Small Business Program Manager / Health Scientist Administrator working on projects related to legislatively mandated annual reporting of grant funding for small businesses to the Small Business Administration (SBA) on behalf of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Before that, she was an American Association for the Advancement of Science Science and Technology Policy Fellow placed in the Cloud Services Office at the NIH Center for Information Technology, working on the NIH Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability (STRIDES) Initiative. In her fourteen+ years at NIH, Dr. Virta has also served as a scientific writer / consultant for the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH), a scientific editor (contractor) for PubMed Health at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), and a Postdoctoral Intramural Research Training Awards (IRTA) recipient studying movements of neural crest cells during jaw development in zebrafish at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). Dr. Virta received two Bachelor of Science degrees from The University of Texas at Austin, one in Molecular Biology and another in Mathematics. She completed her PhD in Biology / Zoology from the University of Washington studying the evolution, development, and cell movements of body axis straightening in teleost fishes, using the zebrafish yolk extension as an experimental model.