Gerald Gartlehner

Gerald Gartlehner is a leading expert in evidence-based medicine and evidence synthesis methodology who has helped lead the RTI International-University of North Carolina Evidence-based Practice Center. He is a published expert with more than 20 years of experience, serves on various academic boards, and teaches collegiate courses at European universities.

 Dr. Gartlehner focuses his energies on projects that advance the field of evidence synthesis. He developed criteria for distinguishing efficacy and effectiveness trials, explored Bayesian methods with real-world data and simulations, and developed guidance for handling clinical heterogeneity, rating the strength of evidence, and conducting rapid reviews. He was the first to address persistent methodological problems of single-reviewer abstract screening through crowdsourcing.

Dr. Gartlehner also serves as a consultant for the World Health Organization, the Austrian Ministry of Health, and the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Healthcare. He participates in international method groups, including the Cochrane Rapid Reviews Method Group and the GRADE (Grading of Recommendation Assessment, Development, and Evaluation) Working Group.

He has extensive experience in academia. Dr. Gartlehner teaches at Descartes University in Paris, France, and Austria’s Landsteiner University for Heath Science. He also serves as the Department for Evidence-based Medicine and Evaluation chair at Danube University in Krems, Austria.

Dr. Gartlehner serves as the associate director of the RTI International-University of North Carolina Evidence-based Practice Center (RTI-UNC EPC). This position and his role as director of Cochrane Austria resulted in his leadership and participation in multiple comparative effectiveness reviews. The topics were on prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of various conditions. In 2015, he served as the chair of the organizing committee of the 23^rd Cochrane Colloquium. It is the largest global scientific meeting in evidence-based medicine.

Dr. Gartlehner joined RTI in 2011. His expertise in evidence-based medicine and synthesis methodology led him to publish more than 240 peer-reviewed publications. Clarivate Web of Science ranked Dr. Gartlehner in the top 1% of highly cited researchers in 2020 and 2021.