Nancy Padian is an internationally recognized leader in the epidemiology and prevention of HIV/AIDS and is an expert in related implementation science and health systems research. She is a senior technical advisor at the Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator for the President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and is a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley in the School of Public Health. She is an an elected member of the Institute of Medicine, the American Epidemiology Society, and the International Society for Sexually Transmitted Disease Research and has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles.

Robust data and analytics are the back bone of evidence-based public health programs and policies, and the significance of these issues means that the data, which underlie them be held to the highest level of scrutiny. This requires that such data be transparent and accessible and that the research and analytics, which produced them, be replicable. This is essential not only to make current decisions but also for posterity, to understand the history and evolution of public health practice. Implementation science with its focus on how best to deliver health solutions, illustrates this need by valuing careful documentation of the methods by which a program is rolled out as much as the results it achieves. BITSS exemplifies these same principles of transparency and openness by providing a forum for their dissemination and a tool set to facilitate their adoption.