Leslie Oley Wilberforce

The Engineer Who Gave Patients a Seat at the Research Table

In 2015, Leslie Oley Wilberforce left the world of consumer medical devices - where she'd just launched a sleep apnea product that won both an IDEA Award and a Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award - and joined a startup with a counterintuitive thesis: that the most valuable thing in health research wasn't the lab or the hospital. It was the person at home, wearing their fitness tracker, filling out a survey on their phone.

Ten years later, that startup is Evidation. It has five million participants. It covers 97% of US zip codes. Thirteen of the fifteen largest life sciences companies are partners. And in March 2025, Wilberforce became its CEO - the first person to run the company who didn't co-found it.

That's a specific kind of trust. It doesn't come from a recruiting search. It comes from a decade of being the person who actually built the thing.

From Biomechanics to Biodata

Wilberforce earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Penn State, then headed to Stanford for her master's, where she conducted NSF-funded research in biomechanics. That's the study of how forces move through biological structures - the physics of people. It's an unusual foundation for a tech CEO, but it turns out to be exactly the right one for someone who would spend her career thinking about how data flows through human health systems.

Her first corporate chapter was at Boston Scientific, where she moved from R&D engineering into product management - learning how to translate clinical need into product reality on a global scale. She spent roughly four years there before pivoting to smaller, faster-moving startups.

At Voyage Medical, then ApniCure, she sharpened her skills in consumer-facing health technology. The ApniCure product she led was a consumer sleep apnea therapy. It won awards. More importantly, it taught her something that would define her subsequent decade: that patients, given the right tool and the right incentive, will engage deeply with their own health data.

That question had an answer. It was called Evidation.

A Decade Inside the Machine

When Wilberforce joined Evidation in 2015, the company was still finding its footing. Digital health was a crowded, noisy space, and data collection from consumers was increasingly fraught - many competitors were harvesting data without clear consent, obscuring what they took and how they used it.

Evidation took the opposite stance. The platform was built on an explicit value exchange: you share your data, we tell you what it means, we connect you to research you care about, and you earn rewards for participating. Transparency as a product feature, not a PR strategy.

"I do hope that we influenced the market somewhat there," Wilberforce said, "because we were just very unwavering about what our approach would be."

She rose through the organization - from product and consumer roles to President and Chief Operating Officer - and along the way, she became the architect of Evidation's enterprise platform. Not just the consumer-facing app, but the full infrastructure that lets biopharma companies, nonprofits, and government agencies run research programs at scale, through a participant base that skews toward the general population rather than academic medical center catchment areas.

That geographic breadth matters more than it sounds. Clinical research has historically overrepresented patients near major research hospitals - which skews toward urban, affluent, and predominantly white populations. Evidation's footprint in 97% of US zip codes is a structural response to that problem.

The Heartline Study: When a Smartwatch Became a Trial Site

The clearest demonstration of what Wilberforce and Evidation built together is the Heartline Study - a collaboration with Johnson & Johnson and Apple announced in 2019, with enrollment opening in 2020. The study enrolled 150,000 Medicare-eligible adults to test whether the Heartline app on iPhone, combined with the Apple Watch's ECG and atrial fibrillation detection features, could reduce stroke risk through earlier AFib detection.

No clinical sites. No waiting rooms. Participants enrolled from home, via their phone, and the study ran virtually - surveys, app interactions, and wearable data doing the work that would have previously required patients to travel to a research center repeatedly over years. The study design was possible only because Evidation had spent years building the infrastructure, the participant trust, and the data governance frameworks to make it work.

It was the kind of study that, five years earlier, no one had a mechanism to run. Wilberforce helped design the mechanism.

First Non-Founder at the Helm

In March 2025, Evidation co-founder Christine Lemke stepped down as CEO, transitioning to advisor and board member. Wilberforce, who had been serving as President and COO, was named CEO - Evidation's first non-founder to hold the role in its thirteen-year history.

Lemke's description of her successor: "A driven leader whose operational prowess and people-first leadership approach made her indispensable."

The appointment came with a specific strategic moment. Real-world evidence generation is accelerating - driven by FDA interest, pharma pipeline pressures, and the proliferation of wearable and passive health data. The question is who controls that data pipeline, and whose interests it serves. Wilberforce has a clear answer: the individual's.

"We own the connection with the individual, not the connection to the system," she has said. That framing - individual over institution - shapes how Evidation builds products, structures partnerships, and recruits participants. It's also increasingly a competitive differentiator, as patients grow more sophisticated about data privacy and more selective about who gets access to their health information.

Alongside the leadership transition, Evidation announced a new partnership with the American Heart Association's Research Goes Red program - focused on enrolling more women in cardiovascular studies, a population historically underrepresented in clinical research.

Why "Individuals Own Their Data" is a Business Model, Not a Bumper Sticker

Most health data platforms treat participant data as a byproduct of a transaction - you use our app, we collect your data. Evidation was designed around a different premise: your data has value, you should know it has value, and you should receive value in return for sharing it.

This shows up in the platform's points and rewards system, in the personalized health insights Evidation sends back to participants, and in the consent architecture that governs what researchers can access. It also shows up in how Wilberforce talks about the platform's participants - not as a "panel" or a "cohort" but as people who chose to engage.

"The recognition that their data are valuable and that they're contributing to something larger means a lot," she has said.

The company is also deploying machine learning to add intrinsic value beyond rewards. In one example Wilberforce has discussed publicly, Evidation developed a migraine prediction model capable of flagging warning signs before a migraine begins - then used that model to engage participants proactively, prompting actions that might reduce severity or duration. The model runs on the same data participants have already chosen to share.

The phrase she uses for the goal: "those magical moments when you can use the data to find someone at the right time and engage them in just the right way to prompt them toward an action that creates value." That's not data monetization. It's data as care.

The Horizon

In May 2025, Wilberforce published a perspective in STAT News on re-centering real-world data on the individual - articulating the case that health data collected outside clinical sites has historically been extracted from people rather than shared with them. The argument is both ethical and practical: participants who get something back from sharing their data are more likely to keep sharing it, more likely to stay engaged in longitudinal studies, and more likely to consent to follow-up research.

The application areas Evidation is pursuing under Wilberforce's leadership span cardiometabolic disease, neurology (particularly Parkinson's, via the Michael J. Fox Foundation partnership), mental health, and the emerging category of digital biomarkers - signals derived from passive data that can serve as proxies for clinical outcomes without requiring a hospital visit.

As GLP-1 therapies reshape metabolic disease management and AI tools accelerate the analysis of multimodal health data, the infrastructure Wilberforce has spent a decade building looks increasingly well-positioned. Evidation's combination of participant scale, geographic diversity, longitudinal data depth, and explicit consent architecture is not easy to replicate quickly.

She was at this company when it was figuring out what it was. She helped decide what it became. Now she's deciding what it becomes next.