Joan T. Merrill, MD

Joan T. Merrill, MD, is member and director of clinical projects, Arthritis & Clinical Immunology Research Program, Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF); OMRF professor of medicine, the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center; and adjunct professor of medicine, New York University Langone Health. She is also chief advisor for clinical development for the Lupus Foundation of America and director of the 20-year-old Oklahoma Lupus Cohort, a resource providing serial clinical evaluations and blood samples from more than 650 patients with systemic lupus, incomplete lupus, or primary antiphospholipid syndrome.

During her career, she has provided medical care for more than 1000 patients with lupus and has played leading roles in the design, execution, and analysis of many multicenter clinical trials of new treatments for lupus. At the OMRF, she has been awarded multiple government grants and contracts with pharmaceutical companies to perform small studies that link immune phenotypes to treatment efficacy. She has worked closely with colleagues Drs Judith James and Joel Guthridge to extend these studies to both government- and pharmaceutical-sponsored multicenter trials. She is an emeritus member of the Systemic Lupus International Collaborating Clinics and performs autoantibody testing for many of their ongoing projects.

Dr Merrill has more than 290 peer-reviewed publications, including primary papers, review articles, invited commentaries, and book chapters.