After a decade helming the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Catherine DeAngelis will step down as Editor-in-Chief in June 2011. She plans to return to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland to establish a Center for Professionalism in Medicine and the Related Professions, according to a JAMA press release.

DeAngelis will probably be best remembered for her tough stances on the publication of pharmaceutical industry-sponsored research. In 2008, JAMA published two studies accusing Merck of ghost-writing studies on its now-withdrawn painkiller Vioxx. The journal also published research challenging the safety of GlaxoSmithKline’s diabetes drug Avandia. JAMA now prohibits ghost-writing and requires registration of the clinical trials it publishes.

During her tenture, DeAngelis also earned a reputation as an enforcer of JAMA’s media embargo policy, prone to blacklisting reporters who ran afoul of it. And according to the Wall Street Journal, she called a neuroanatomy researcher who criticized a JAMA study a “nobody and a nothing”.