Andrew C. von Eschenbach is an advisor and former chairman of the Manhattan Institute’s Project FDA. In 2005–09, he was commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, where he championed an agenda to modernize the FDA. Von Eschenbach joined the FDA after four years as director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) at the National Institutes of Health, where he set an ambitious goal to eliminate the suffering and death due to cancer by rapid acceleration and integration of the discovery-development-delivery continuum. At the time of his appointment by President Bush to serve as director of NCI, he was president-elect of the American Cancer Society. Von Eschenbach entered government service after more than three decades as a surgeon, oncologist, and executive, including numerous leadership roles, from chairman of the department of urologic oncology to executive vice president and chief academic, at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. From 2011 to 2014, von Eschenbach served on the board of directors for BioTime, Inc.

Author of more than 300 scientific articles and studies, von Eschenbach was a founding member of the National Dialogue on Cancer. In 2006, he was named one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People to Shape the World”; in 2007 and 2008, he was selected as one of Modern Healthcare / Modern Physician’s “50 Most Powerful Physician Executives in Healthcare.”

Von Eschenbach holds a B.S. from St. Joseph’s University and an M.D. from Georgetown University School of Medicine. Early in his career, he was a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy Medical Corps. After completing a residency in urologic surgery at Pennsylvania Hospital, von Eschenbach was an instructor in urology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.