The National Institutes of Health has a new permanent chief information officer after its last permanent CIO, Adele Merritt, left the agency in August 2025. Maureen Falvella became the CIO and director of the Office of the Chief Information Officer effective July 26, 2026, she announced on LinkedIn. Falvella oversees the agency’s $1.9 billion IT infrastructure and coordinates with leadership, institutes, centers and industry partners to advance biomedical research, according to NIH. The NIH CIO role Falvella holds is a bit different from what it was several years ago, when the agency’s decade-long CIO and center for information technology director, Andrea Norris, was at the agency, according to Alastair Thomson, a former National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute CIO. The CIO now reports to the center for information technology director while they used to report to the NIH director and principal deputy director, he told Nextgov/FCW.