Dr. James Buchanan is presently an independent drug safety consultant. Dr. Buchanan began his industry career at Genentech where he worked for 9 years in the areas of medical information and drug safety. He subsequently established the drug safety departments at Gilead, Tularik and Nuvelo. Dr. Buchanan next served at BioSoteria as the head of the medical and safety consulting group. Dr. Buchanan is currently president of Covilance, LLC, a drug safety consulting service. He is also a co-lead of the American Statistical Association Biopharmaceutical Safety Working Group Interactive Safety Graphics taskforce that is developing novel, open-source interactive graphical tools to identify and evaluate safety issues during drug development.