Genesis Research Group has named Sarah Alwardt, PhD, as Executive Vice President of Real-World Evidence and Health Economics and Outcomes Research, adding her to the company’s Executive Leadership Team as she takes over responsibility for the firm’s global RWE and HEOR business. The appointment gives the Hoboken headquartered life sciences consultancy a leader whose career has been built almost entirely around the specific discipline she is now being brought in to run at a larger scale.

A Career Built Around Turning Health Data Into Strategy

Alwardt arrives at Genesis with more than 20 years of experience in leadership, strategy, and operations across the biopharmaceutical industry, with a specific focus on real world data and advanced analytics aimed at maximizing how effectively a therapy demonstrates its value once it reaches the market. Before stepping into health economics consulting, she spent years at McKesson, where she launched and led Ontada, the company’s oncology research business built around evidence development strategy. Under her leadership, Ontada produced more than 200 scientific publications and supported multiple regulatory filings, a track record that established her as someone capable of building an evidence generation operation essentially from scratch rather than simply managing an existing one.

That experience carried directly into her time at Avalere Health, where she joined as practice director of the Center for Healthcare Transformation before eventually rising to lead the firm’s Evidence and Strategy practice. She was later named interim president of Avalere following the departure of longtime president Elizabeth Carpenter, and the interim label did not last long. Avalere confirmed Alwardt as its permanent president, giving her authority over the firm’s consulting, sales, and operational functions, while simultaneously naming her to lead Avalere Health’s broader U.S. Policy, Access, Value, and Evidence capability, a dual role that put her at the center of how one of the industry’s most established consultancies helps biopharma clients navigate everything from federal drug pricing policy to real world evidence strategy.

What Genesis Research Actually Does

Founded in 2009, Genesis Research Group operates as an international healthcare consultancy built around helping pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device companies generate the evidence needed to bring products to market and keep them there. The firm’s core work spans real world evidence generation, drawing on clinical and commercial health data gathered outside the controlled environment of a traditional clinical trial, alongside health economics and outcomes research aimed at demonstrating a treatment’s clinical effectiveness and economic value to the payers and regulators who ultimately decide whether it gets covered and at what price.

The firm has also built out a market access and pricing strategy practice to help clients navigate the increasingly complex, multi country regulatory and reimbursement landscape biopharma companies now operate within, along with a proprietary evidence synthesis platform called EVID, an AI driven literature search tool designed to help the firm’s scientists aggregate and analyze scientific literature considerably faster than traditional manual review allows. Genesis employs more than 200 scientists, data specialists, and consultants across offices in Hoboken and Newcastle, England, backed by an institutional investment partnership with GHO Capital, a healthcare focused private equity firm.

Building Out a Deeper Executive Bench

Alwardt’s arrival continues a pattern of executive additions Genesis has made to its leadership team over the past year, including the appointment of Tim Wright as Executive Vice President of Access and Pricing, a fellow biopharma consulting veteran with more than three decades of industry experience spanning direct pharmaceutical roles and specialized pricing consulting. Taken together, the additions suggest a firm actively building out a deeper executive bench across its core service lines, RWE and HEOR under Alwardt, access and pricing under Wright, positioning Genesis to compete more directly with larger, more established consultancies in a life sciences data and evidence market that has grown increasingly central to how new therapies get priced, positioned, and ultimately reimbursed.

For a firm headquartered in Hoboken with a global footprint stretching to the United Kingdom, landing an executive with Alwardt’s specific combination of technical training, operational experience building an evidence business from the ground up, and a recent run leading one of the industry’s more visible consulting brands represents a meaningful vote of confidence in Genesis Research’s own trajectory, and a signal that the New Jersey based firm intends to keep competing for the same caliber of leadership talent as the larger players in its space.