Sheila Pierson, MS, is the Director of Registry Enrollment for the CDCN as well as the Associate Director for Clinical Research for the CSTL at the University of Pennsylvania. She leads the global patient registry of Castleman disease, ACCELERATE, which operates in partnership between the CDCN and CSTL. She hopes that ACCELERATE can be used as a model for other rare disease research groups. In addition, she oversees and executes analyses for other CDCN-sponsored clinical research projects. She received her MS from Columbia University.