Dr. Tonning is a board-certified physician in Clinical Informatics and Occupational Medicine and a licensed pharmacist. He applied his medical and pharmacy knowledge for 17 years at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) within the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER). At FDA, he served as an Associate Director of Biomedical Informatics and forged a partnership with the National Library of Medicine to study natural language processing applied to FDA labeling resulting in an international scientific presentation at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He spearheaded various data mining initiatives within CDER and served as the Coordinator of the FDA Data Mining Forum. He also served as the FDA liaison for the FDA-PhRMA Safety Evaluation Tools Working Group, the Co-Chair of the New Molecular Entity Steering Committee, and the Co-Chair of the FDA Data Mining Council. He completed his medical residency, Masters in Public Health, and clinical fellowship in Occupational Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is currently a private practice physician and medical consultant in the Washington, DC area.