Meet the Team

Cierra Buckman is the founder of TrialON and a PhD student in Population Health Sciences at Duke University. She brings more than 10 years of experience in clinical research administration, operations, and implementation across academic medical centers and health systems.

Before founding TrialON, Cierra led clinical research operations at a large health system, overseeing research support teams, startup workflows, budgets, and operational infrastructure across a broad clinical trial portfolio. Her work exposed a persistent challenge in clinical research: study startup depends on highly skilled teams, but those teams are often forced to coordinate complex regulatory, contract, budget, and document workflows through disconnected tools, manual tracking, and institutional workarounds.

TrialON grew out of that experience. Cierra is building software that reflects how clinical research teams actually work, with the goal of helping sites reduce administrative burden, improve visibility, and move studies toward activation more efficiently.

She holds a Master of Health Sciences from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and is currently completing doctoral training at Duke, where her work focuses on clinical trials design and health services research.