The move signals an attempt by the new FDA regime, led by commish Margaret Hamburg, to reach out to friend and foe. In his role at Public Citizen, Lurie has repeatedly roughed up the agency, but Hamburg, as Forbes notes, would like the FDA to become more of an “arbiter” of public health.

Lurie will be in the agency’s Office of Policy, where he will help develop strategies to facilitate medical product availability to meet critical public health needs, reporting to the Assistant Commissioner for Policy. The appointment was first reported by DrugWonks, which is run Peter Pitts, a former FDA official, a Porter Novelli pr exec and a co-founder of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest

Lurie’s appointment is one of a series of prominent additions to the FDA’s staff, the mag notes. Among recent FDA appointments: Jonathan Taylor, a lawyer who has worked at the biotechnology industry’s trade group and at Abbott Labs and Alta Charo, a noted bioethicist.