Peter Pitts
Senior Vice President, Global Health Affairs
Manning Selvage & Lee/Washington, DC
From 2002-2004 Peter was FDA's Associate Commissioner for External Relations, serving as the agency's "Chief Messaging Officer." As the senior communications adviser to Dr. McClellan, Mr. Pitts provided executive level policy and program direction for FDA's interactions, information exchanges and liaison activities with the agency's stakeholders and other external audiences. He supervised FDA's Office of Public Affairs, Office of the Ombudsman, Office of Special Health Issues, Office of Executive Secretariat, and Advisory Committee Oversight and Management. Before his work with the FDA, Mr. Pitts was Managing Partner of Wired World, a strategic public awareness company. He has served as Marketing Manager at the newly formed Cable Health Network, later to become Lifetime Network, Associate Creative Director at Reader's Digest, Creative Services Director at McCall's Magazine, Director of Marketing at The New York Post, and Director of Marketing for The Washington Times and Insight Magazine. His track record brought recognition and an invitation from the internationally known Hudson Institute, which he joined in 1995 as Vice President of Marketing and Communications.
His most recent book, Become Strategic or Die, is widely recognized as a cutting edge study of how leadership, in order to be successful over the long term, must be combined with strategic vision and ethical practice. Mr. Pitts writes a regularly syndicated national column for United Press International on topics related to successful leadership practices. He is frequently interviewed by the business press and has recently published a well-regarded article on communications theory in public relations The Strategist and on crisis communications in the wake of the recent StarLink/biotechnology crisis in PR Tactics.
He teaches as an adjunct professor at Indiana University's School of Public and Environmental Affairs. In 1998 he was voted one of Indianapolis' 40 Under 40 by the Indianapolis Business Journal.