2022 – 2023 Executive Committee
President
Evelyn Twentyman, MD, MPH – EIS ‘14 (2020-2023)
Evelyn serves as Medical Epidemiologist with the CDC Division of Reproductive Health Global Reproductive Health Evidence for Action Team, partnering with country governments to enhance surveillance, response, prevention and intervention for maternal and perinatal deaths. As an EIS officer on this same team, she loved building stakeholder collaborations to improve public health programming and outcomes, and stayed on to advance these efforts. She is passionate about connecting people, and is looking forward to supporting EIS alumni and current officers by building up mechanisms and infrastructure for connection and mentorship.
President-elect
Lisa Oakley, PhD, MPH — EIS ‘18 (2021-2024)
Lisa is a Behavioral Epidemiologist in the International Infection Control Program in CDC’s Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion (DHQP) where she supports implementation of infection prevention and programs to reduce antimicrobial resistance in healthcare settings in the Middle East and North Africa. During her doctoral training she worked at CDC as an ORISE Fellow in the Division of High-Consequence Pathogens and Pathology. After completing a postdoc in health policy, Lisa returned to the CDC as an EIS officer at Kaiser Permanente Southern California’s Department of Research and Evaluation before moving back to Atlanta to join DHQP. She joined the EISAA Executive Committee to help current officers integrate into the social network of EISAA, help alumni connect or reconnect with each other, and to engage with potential officers to help bring in new, diverse cohorts of motivated public health professionals into EIS.
Secretary/Treasurer
Lindsey Shields, DVM, DACVPM – EIS ‘15 (2021-2024)
Lindsey is the Deputy Director of the Global Health Security Initiative at PATH, where she supports a portfolio of international public health projects partnering with national and international stakeholders. Lindsey served as an EIS officer in the Division of Foodborne, Waterborne, and Environmental Diseases where she had the opportunity to respond to outbreaks of typhoid, cholera, Ebola, and botulism. During her career Lindsey has worked for the UN and other US government agencies and credits her time at EIS as being a defining period in her career. She is looking forward to supporting the EISAA especially in the areas of recruitment and alumni engagement.
At-large representatives
Linda Bartlett, MD, MHSc — EIS ‘98 (2021-2024)
Linda is on faculty at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where, since 2007, she has implemented research, taught and provided guidance to local governments and other stakeholders on maternal and perinatal health issues, and health system solutions in low resource settings. In different capacities, she has served several UN agencies, including WHO and UNICEF and other academic institutions domestically and internationally. She also is actively engaged in consulting, most recently on a large Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded project in India. She completed EIS, class of 1998, at the Maternal and Infant Health Branch of the Division of Reproductive Health in Atlanta and stayed for 7 years before leaving to join the UN in Afghanistan to lead their maternal health program. Linda considers EIS to be pivotal opportunity in both her career and life path and is thrilled to have the opportunity to give back in service in the EISAA.
Mark Dworkin, MD, MPH&TM — EIS ’94 (2022-2025)
Mark is a Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health and Associate Director for Epidemiology in the Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. He completed EIS as a Field Officer assigned to the Washington State Department of Health. His experience as an EIS Officer strongly influenced his career path leading him to work at the CDC in Atlanta, as a State Epidemiologist for the Illinois Department of Public Health, and to teach outbreak investigation and surveillance courses as well as serve as the editor of a textbook of first person accounts of mostly EIS investigated outbreaks. He is excited to be more closely involved with the EIS program through the EIS Alumni Association.
Amanda Garcia-Williams, PhD, MPH – EIS ‘15 (2022-2025)
Amanda is a health scientist in the Office of Science in CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control where she supports extramural research activities. She joined CDC in 2015 as an EIS officer in the Division of Violence Prevention where she investigated youth suicide in California, fentanyl-related overdose deaths in Ohio, and trained enumerators implementing the Violence Against Children Survey in Botswana. Over her career at CDC, Amanda has worked in the Division of Foodborne, Waterborne, and Environmental Diseases, Division of Global HIV and TB, and the Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion and she has supported multiple agency wide responses (Zika, Ebola, and COVID-19). She is looking forward to supporting the EISAA in the areas of mentoring, recruitment, and alumni engagement.
Kathleen F. Gensheimer, MD, MPH — EIS ‘81 (2020-2023)
Kathleen currently serves as Medical Officer in the Office of Analytics and Outreach, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, FDA. She completed EIS as a Field Officer, assigned to the Maine Bureau of Health, Maine Department of Health and Human Services, where she was designated as State Epidemiologist on her first day on the job. She remained as Maine’s State Epidemiologist for 28 years, active in CSTE, serving as the lead for influenza pandemic planning efforts. She was recruited to FDA to lead a newly designated entity, the Coordinated Outbreak Response and Evaluation Network, overseeing FDA’s response to foodborne disease investigations. She looks forward to serving on the Executive Committee, supporting EIS as a critical training program in an ever-changing world, where public health resources are continually eroded and where the breakdown of public trust remains as one of our biggest challenges.
Shannon Hader, MD, MPH — EIS ‘99 (2022-2025)
Shannon is currently Dean & Professor at the School of International Service at American University, a top-ten school of international studies with a mission to ‘wage peace’ and be of service to humanity. Since EIS, she’s worked across research, program, policy, and politics, and in a diversity of roles and challenging situations. Previous roles include: Assistant Secretary General, United Nations/Deputy Executive Director for Programmes at UNAIDS; Director, Division of Global HIV & TB, CDC; Sr Scientific Advisor, PEPFAR program, Department of State; Candidate for US Congress WA-8 2018; Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow; Vice President, Futures Group (now Palladium); Director HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis, STD & TB Administration, Washington DC Department of Heath; Director, CDC Zimbabwe. She’s passionate about: making sure EIS increasingly reflects our communities and remains strongly supported (internally & externally; promoting networking among EIS Alums; and encouraging public health experts to step into leadership roles for multi-disciplinary responses for healthy lives around the world.
Class of 2019 Representative
Rachael Zacks, MD – EIS ‘19 (2021-2024)
Rachael is finishing her EIS fellowship as a medical officer in the Emergency Response and Recovery Branch in the Center for Global Health. She is grateful for the diverse array of domestic and international public health training she has received during EIS, with emphasis on outbreak response in resource poor settings, humanitarian emergencies and COVID-19 mitigation strategies. She will be transitioning to occupational medicine residency at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health starting in July 2021 to further her goal of improving the health of humanity across the globe. Getting to serve as the outgoing class representative is an exciting opportunity to give back to the EIS program, it’s members both current and future, and contribute to the overall EISAA mission.
Class of 2020 Representative
Ariella P. Dale, PhD, MPH – EIS ‘20 (2022-2025)
Ariella served as an EIS Officer joint assigned to the Maricopa County Department of Public Health and Arizona Department of Health Services. After graduation, she will transition to the role of Public Health Scientist at the Maricopa County Department of Public Health to continue her passion for positively impacting local communities. She is honored to serve as the representative for the class of 2020 and is looking forward to giving back to the EIS Program through support of potential, current, and former officers. She hopes to bring creative ideas for fostering connections in a virtual world..
Immediate Past President
Gus Birkhead, MD, MPH — EIS ‘85 (2019-2022)
Gus is currently a professor of epidemiology at the University at Albany School of Public Health. He spent most of his public health career since EIS at the New York State Department of Health, from which he retired in 2015 as deputy commissioner for public health. He has been active in CSTE and ASTHO, and co-lead the development of the CDC/CSTE Applied Epidemiology Competencies. He is honored to be serving on the EISAA Executive Committee, and hopes he can ‘pay back’ to EIS by bringing to the table his experience in public health education and in epidemiology practice at the state health department level.
Ex-Officio Member
EIS Program Representative
Eric Pevzner, PhD, MPH — EIS ‘05
Eric currently serves as Chief of the EIS Program and Epidemiology Workforce Branch. Eric began working with CDC in 1996 while earning his MPH at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. He has had several landmark opportunities including the opportunity to contribute to establishing a youth tobacco surveillance system to provide national and state level data to support youth tobacco prevention and control activities. He also contributed to CDC’s emergency response to H1N1 in Mexico and Ebola in West Africa. Since 2005, he has worked to conduct research and provide technical assistance to implement and evaluate policies and interventions in Africa and Asia to improve the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of TB, HIV, and TB/HIV. He enjoys working with the EIS Alumni Association to identify new ways to link alumni with prospective applicants who want to know more about what EIS Officers actually do and what roles they play in public health upon completion of the fellowship.
Ex-Officio Member
CDC Foundation Representative
Diana Robelotto Scalera
Diana serves as the CDC Foundation’s Director of Alumni Affairs and operates as the EIS Alumni Association’s primary liaison with the Foundation. She graduated from the University of Georgia and has a background in marketing/communications. She joined the CDC Foundation in 2014, bringing with her 11 years of experience at the American Cancer Society. She played a large role in helping the EISAA secure grant funding from the de Beaumont Foundation, which has enabled the Association to expand its roles in EIS Program recruitment and alumni networking. She helps maintain a database of EIS Alumni and is always ready to help put Alumni in touch with recruitment or meet-and-greet opportunities in their geographic areas.
Past EISAA Executive Committee roster archive:
2021-2022 EISAA Executive Committee
2020-2021 EISAA Executive Committee
2019-2020 EISAA Executive Committee
2018-2019 EISAA Executive Committee
2017-2018 EISAA Executive Committee
2016-2017 EISAA Executive Committee
2015-2016 EISAA Executive Committee