Our Experienced Research Team

The Velocity Providence team of physician investigators and clinical research professionals are experienced clinical researchers. All physicians are board certified in their specialty area(s) and all research staff is trained in clinical research regulations, including GCP and HIPAA. Training records and certifications are maintained. Our clinical team is dedicated to conducting quality research in a professional and caring environment and strives on collecting quality data.

Please meet our Lead Principal Investigator and Site Director.

David Fried, MD

Medical Director, Principal Investigator

David Fried, MD serves as Medical Director for Velocity Clinical Research, Providence (formerly Omega Medical Research) as well as the Principal Investigator on a significant number of our clinical drug trials. Dr. Fried has served in this capacity since 1996. He has been the PI on over 350 clinical drug trials. Dr. Fried is Board Certified in Internal Medicine and serves as a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at Brown University. In addition, he is an internist with Coastal Medical, Inc., a regionally based primary care group practice that serves over 100,000 patients from RI and Southeastern Massachusetts.

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Lynne Haughey, MSN, FNP-BC

Site Director

Lynne A. Haughey, MSN, FNP-BC began her career as a Registered Nurse in Intensive Care Unit and within five years became Head Nurse in the ICU. She progressed to become Director of Critical Care Nursing overseeing ICU, CCU, Telemetry, ICU step down and Dialysis Units at a local Rhode Island hospital. Lynne then became Director of Stratogen Health in RI, a comprehensive HIV/AIDS treatment center. While in this role she began studies at the University of RI to pursue a Masters degree in Nursing as a Family Nurse Practitioner. This also coincided with the establishment in 1993 of Omega Medical Research, now Velocity Clinical – Providence with her business partner Johnna Pezzullo, RN.

Lynne has over 25 years of clinical research experience with extensive experience in patient recruitment, quality assurance and management of research staff. She has served as Sub-Investigator on most trials at Velocity - Providence, with over 400 trials completed in this capacity. She believes that clinical research is and always has been a win-win proposition; patients are provided state of the art health care and medications, and providers of clinical research help develop cutting edge pharmaceuticals and earn a living doing it. What keeps her up at night is the overwhelming responsibility at the site level for everything a subject does, everything staff does and the enormous expectations and nuances every study holds.

Lynne has a Whoodle (a soft coat Wheaton terrier and poodle) named Ruby and loves kayaking, hiking, boating and beaching when not at work. She spends an inordinate amount of time at swimming pools as her children are both competitive swimmers who hope to make the Olympics some day! (Kids can dream). Although Lynne applied for a spot on TV’s Survivor, she was not chosen.

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Johnna Pezzullo, RN, BSN

Sr. Director, Corporate Development

Johnna Pezzullo, RN, BSN started her nursing career working on a medical -surgical unit, then moved to work on a step-down unit for post- CABG patients. She worked on a telemetry unit, then onto Intensive Care and CCU. While working in the ICU, she had an opportunity to work in the Clinical Trials Department for Dermatology and became the Director of Dermatology Clinical Trials for the hospital. Knowing that Clinical Research was her future, she decided to venture out on her own and co-founded Independent Research Nurses, Inc. with her business partner, Lynne Haughey. This was initially established as a staffing agency to provide study coordinators to physicians conducting clinical trials. However, it quickly evolved into a research site, later named Omega Medical Research. For 26 years, she was co-owner and President and CEO of Omega Medical Research, which became the largest, free-standing, women-owned, dedicated research center in Rhode Island. Recognized as a top tier clinical trial site, Omega Medical Research was frequently sought out by Sponsor’s and CRO’s to participate in their clinical trials. Omega Medical Research conducted over 80 vaccine trials and over 500 clinical trials before being acquired by Velocity Clinical Research.

Johnna finds that being a part of the process that brings new therapies and treatments such as HIV, H1N1, and now Covid, to patients is extremely rewarding. She enjoys being able to see clinical development from the ground up and to appreciate how much the site research work has an impact on the lives of others. She looks forward to Velocity Clinical Research setting itself apart from other network companies by focusing on quality of data collected, and remaining at its core, focused on gratitude for all the volunteers that participate in clinical trials.

When not at work, Johnna loves walking through the woods to hunt for mushrooms and encourages every aspiring mushroomer to carry a compass! Her favorite holiday is Halloween and she strives to have the scariest house on her street. Her youthful goal of being a rock star or ball room dancer fell by the wayside when she discovered that she could neither sing nor dance. Fortunately, she also knew she wanted to be a nurse and the rest is history!

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