Cheryl D. Coon, PhD is a psychometrician with 15 years of experience as a consultant in the pharmaceutical field. She applies qualitative and quantitative methods to the development and evaluation of PRO instruments.  During her years in the PRO field, she has been involved in the creation and evaluation of PRO instruments in all stages of the development process, packaging evidence into PRO dossiers and defending the use of PROs to construct endpoints during regulatory interactions. Additionally, she has led the statistical analysis of PRO endpoint data in phase 2 and 3 clinical trials, with particular understanding of the interpretation of PRO scores.  She takes a pragmatic approach to PRO instrument development and seeks to make instruments more interpretable and data from them more actionable. Dr. Coon earned her PhD degree in Quantitative Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where her research focused on item response theory and where she was involved in the early work on the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System.