Abigail Dirks is a Senior Data Scientist at the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development (Tufts CSDD) where she specializes in analyzing large datasets pertaining to all aspects of industryfunded drug development performance including protocol design complexity, investigative site burden and experience, risk-based quality management (RBQM) adoption, clinical research associate (CRA) performance, decentralized clinical trials (DCT) use and impact, patient recruitment and retention and study volunteer participation burden. During her tenure at CSDD, Abigail has played a key role in helping the team embrace and utilize automation, modeling and simulation, and AI-enabled approaches to optimize data value and analytics. Abigail has published the results of her studies in peer-review journals including Therapeutic Innovation and Regulatory Science and Clinical and Translational Science. She has also presented at major industry conferences including She has also presented at major industry conferences including the DIA Annual Meeting, SCOPE Summit, and CPHI. She received an MS in Health Informatics and Analytics from Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, MA and a BS in Data Science and Mathematics from St. Michael’s College, Colchester, VT.