Shirley Dorval, MS, is a principal medical writer specializing in informed consent forms at Merck. Shirley received her MS in Biomedical Science from Drexel University College of Medicine. Shirley has participated in research to identify and address health disparities in historically marginalized populations and has extensive volunteer experience working directly with these groups.

Shirley currently participates in initiatives to improve the authoring processes of informed consent forms in general and, more specifically, improving processes to provide informed consent forms for patients with average and below average levels of health literacy.