Maryann Napoli is the associate director of the Center for Medical Consumers, New York City. She is the webmaster and writer of most of this Web site’s articles. Since 1999, she has served on the editorial board of the AJN (American Journal of Nursing) and is a peer reviewer and an occasional writer for that journal. She also serves on an advisory committee of the Office of Medical Applications, which sponsors the State-of-the-Science conferences for the U.S. National Institutes of Health. A contributor to the Cochrane Collaboration, an independent, international organization that evaluates medical research, Napoli is a peer reviewer and a writer of plain language summaries for some Cochrane reviews. She is also a member of the consumer coalition formed under the auspices of the U.S. Cochrane Center, Consumers United for Evidence-Based Healthcare.