Independent, and closer to the practice than most sites get.
This is the longer version of who we are — how the site started, the people who run the studies, and what is actually inside the building on SW 87th Avenue.
Three things we do not trade away
Three commitments made at the start and held to since. They are why participants come back for a second and third study, and why sponsors get clean data the first time.
Quality is non-negotiable
Every protocol, every visit, every data point. Patients are trusting us with their health and sponsors with their most important work. Quality is not something added at the end — it is how the work starts.
Participants are people
Known by name, not by participant ID. They give their time, their bodies and their trust to advance medicine, and that earns more than a stipend and a reminder call.
Everyone counts
If a trial does not include the communities who will eventually take the drug, no one can be confident it works the same way for them. That is why the team is bilingual, and why studies run where patients already are.
It started with who wasn’t in the studies
Pioneer Research was founded in 2021 on a straightforward belief: clinical research is one of the most powerful ways to bring healthcare to the communities that need it most.
For someone without insurance, without a specialist they can get in to see, or without the means to try a newer treatment, a trial can be the difference between waiting and getting answers — between being told there is nothing left to try and being given a real shot at something better.
But that only holds if the research is done properly, and if the people in the study resemble the people the medicine is meant for. Too many trials still enroll populations that look nothing like the patients who will eventually take the drug. When that happens, no one — not the FDA, not the physician writing the prescription, not the patient filling it — can be confident it will work the same way for them. Closing that gap is why this site exists.
So Jeff Somerstein built Pioneer Research around a short list of commitments: a team that reflects the community it serves, bilingual and culturally fluent; standards held high enough that sponsors never have to ask twice; participants treated as people rather than enrollment numbers; and access that is real rather than theoretical — which is why studies run both here and inside the practices patients already visit.
Research for Everyone is not just a tagline — it’s the reason the company exists.
The people you will actually deal with
A small bench, on purpose. Each investigator brings their own patient panel and stays with their own studies from feasibility through close-out.
Ana Elosegui, MD
Board-certified in Family Medicine, trained in both ophthalmology and family practice, with more than a decade of principal investigator experience across Phase I–IV. Her current focus is vaccine research, where she has enrolled hundreds of participants. Bilingual in English and Spanish.
Vinod Chainani, MD
Interventional cardiologist, FACC and SCAI, with subspecialty training at the University of Miami / Jackson Health System and the Ochsner Clinic Foundation. Leads our heart failure, acute MI, atrial fibrillation and ASCVD work, and keeps an active interventional practice in South Florida.
Joseph J. LaConti, MD
MD/PhD from Georgetown and RhMSUS-certified in musculoskeletal ultrasound. Phase III work in lupus, lupus nephritis, giant cell arteritis and osteoporosis, and sub-investigator on more than twenty studies since 2017. Practices within one of South Florida’s largest rheumatology groups. Bilingual.
Jeff Somerstein
Runs operations, business development and recruitment — and also works as a study coordinator on the site’s trials, which is deliberate rather than temporary. Brings fifteen years of building businesses before clinical research. Sponsors and CROs evaluating the site deal with him directly.
What you can hold us to
Patients and sponsors want different things from a research site. Here is what each of you gets, in plain terms.
Three thousand square feet, and every room has a job
Across from Baptist hospital on SW 87th Avenue. Private exam rooms, a processing lab, cold storage and a workspace kept clear for monitors — laid out for study visits rather than adapted from a clinic.
Come see it before you decide.
Sponsors are welcome to tour the site. Patients are welcome to call and ask anything before filling in a form. Either way you’ll get a straight answer about whether we’re a fit.