The Ripple Effect of Federal Health Work: Strengthening States and Communities, One Partnership at a Time
Education
I attended Northern Illinois University for undergraduate school and majored in organizational and corporate communication. After graduation, I worked for the University of Illinois at Chicago and pursued an MPH degree there. That’s where I became interested in health education and health promotion. I graduated in May 2000 and moved to Atlanta in August that year to be close to my parents.
First CDC Job
Shortly after I moved to Atlanta, I got a short-term contract with the chronic disease unit to help develop the cardiovascular version of CDCynergy. This is a digital technical assistance (TA) tool that guides users through a social marketing approach to program planning.
Later CDC Jobs
In 2001, I was awarded a fellowship funded through a pharma donation to the CDC Foundation. I was assigned to the infectious disease unit and worked on a campaign to prevent hospital-acquired, drug-resistant microbial infections. That’s where I was when the 9/11 attack happened, and I’ll never forget being glued to the TV in the lobby.
After that fellowship, I was awarded another and was stationed in North Carolina, but didn’t stay long. I was recruited to come back to Atlanta by the newly appointed evaluator of a national media campaign that was going to promote physical activity among children 9–13 years of age (“tweens”). She wanted my help developing and coordinating community partnerships. The campaign took shape as VERB! (It’s what you do). Parents and other influential adults were a secondary audience.
Around 2003, I interviewed for a full-time, permanent CDC position with the Adolescent and School Health unit. I had enjoyed all my work at the CDC, but this was a project officer position, and I loved it—I embraced the frontline connection between funded agencies and the CDC. I stayed at DASH for 7 years—that division did a such a great job in transferring information to states, schools, and other partners!
As I provided technical assistance and administrative consultation, I was exposed to and became more interested in professional development. I took a position with a scientific education and professional development group at CDC. The agency was active in developing the public health work force, and my work was focused on fellowships that CDC funded. For example, from 2011–12, I implemented curriculum for the Public Health Prevention Service. It was a 3-year training and service program for master’s level graduates with at least one year of paid public health experience, but it no longer exists. I also served as lead educator for the prestigious Presidential Management Fellowship, a leadership training program for post-masters degree federal employees. In 2013, I served as an assessor for that fellowship for the Atlanta region. We interviewed applicants for a full day and I saw up close how incredibly competitive it was—they were the cream of the crop.
Last CDC job
My last job at CDC was with the Office on Smoking and Health (OSH). The aim of this national program was to prevent tobacco use and promote its cessation because it has such a major impact on population health. Within the population, there are specific groups that are disparately affected by tobacco-related disease and who lack access to support for quitting. OSH addressed their needs through technical assistance and supplemental and/or cooperative agreement funding to state health departments and national organizations. For example, I was the technical monitor for a cooperative agreement with the Association for State and Territorial Health Organizations (ASTHO), and they, in turn, managed the Tobacco Control Network, a 30-year old organization through which states and territories can learn tobacco control lessons from each other. I was the CDC representative on their executive committee. I also monitored cooperative agreements for tobacco prevention among youth that were awarded to 8 organizations that addressed smoking disparities by race, ethnicity, and geography.
I helped translate to frontline workers across the whole country evidence that particular prevention strategies were effective. I was the CDC point of contact for 6 states in the Midwest and helped them succeed in implementing their statewide programs. The state programs, in turn, supported local partners.
One very important task was conducting a site visit with every funding recipient once in 5 years. I completed 4 site visits in 2024 by the end of October. For example, I went to South Dakota to visit their tobacco prevention and control program and learned about all the work their partners are doing. Their partnerships are an extension of CDC partnerships. I supported them in their communication efforts, provided technical assistance, and shared the perspective of national leadership. I also provided performance measures for grantees to track, ensuring compliance with regulations and good stewardship of funding, without waste or fraud. This involved collaborating extensively with the Office of Grants Services.
Finally, I had great opportunities for immersion in temporary deployments. For example, I worked on the Ebola outbreak in 2014 in West Africa, training frontline workers from CDC—I can train on anything—and later brought that experience to the Emergency Operations Center during Covid. My last temporary assignment was developing agency-wide policy guidance.
Proudest Achievement
I’m proudest of consistently delivering my best work, regardless of the area of public health I was working in, or which administration held elective office, or the amount of funding a recipient might have gotten. I supported CDC partners as needed, in communication, through technical assistance, and through staff training and professional development of the public health workforce.
I feel privileged to have worked on a number of “firsts” at CDC, starting with the first anti-microbial resistance program. I also worked on the first paid media campaign for tweens, and the original Lab Leaders fellowship curriculum.
And I was proud of organizing a population workforce summit that discussed ways to elevate this approach across the country.
We launched a scientific work group of people committed to education as a science, the Health Education Network, which was relaunched in 2018 and is now considered one of CDC’s science workgroups. I was always in the leadership of the Network but was its chair in the end.
Finally, I was proud that I could help keep epidemics and pandemics from spreading.
The Impact of My Work
The VERB! campaign was very successful. There were high rates of exposure to the campaign among members of the target audience, and exposure was significantly associated with national increases in positive attitudes towards physical activity, the perception that physical activity was encouraged and widespread, and actual physical activity.
Each state has autonomy, and the Federal government has no vote, despite national public health goals. Nonetheless, working cooperatively with states as partners, we’ve brought down rates of smoking, the leading cause of preventable death in the U.S., according to the Youth Tobacco Survey and other indicators.
I held up states that had done particularly good work in one area, on one problem, as models for the rest of the states. That increased the impact of a state’s work exponentially.
Leaving CDC
On April 1, 2025, I arrived at work and sensed strange energy with people bustling about. I logged into my email and saw messages from coworkers saying things like, “I’ve been working for so many years, ya’ll are so wonderful to work with.” Then I scrolled down and saw that “…my services were no longer needed due to a reduction in force.”
My center didn’t kick us out immediately, so there was a somewhat orderly close of the day. I was able to notify all my grantees, and to take an awkward call with one of my states. My entire office was eliminated—almost 80 people.
I was in shock, feeling like I was in a trance while I went through the motions of notifying partners. I’m not sure how I drove home safely.
Many of my coworkers and I had the same first thought: OMG, what is this going to mean for my partners? Meanwhile, their first concern was about us. There was a strong impact on thousands of organizations across the country, an example of how cuts at CDC trickle down detrimentally. Losing staff, losing relationships they have cultivated, losing institutional and historical knowledge of all the work. I know the 6 tobacco state programs and I know their work. I know where they could improve, what goals they’ve met, how they had improved. Now they have no Federal guidance, oversight, support, or partnerships.
Future Plans
I’m not officially fired and am still getting a paycheck, so I can’t get a fulltime job yet legally. I wasn’t ready to come back to CDC right after the termination, but would come back now if they brought me back from administrative leave before my job ends officially. I’m looking for jobs in healthcare (e.g., at the Mayo clinic in Minnesota) and doing some part-time consulting.
Other Comments
I learned that each content area at CDC was incredibly important, no one area more important than another. Infectious disease is really important, and so is workforce development.
Starting out in communication, I went to the program development and management side, and then to professional education. Having been classified a Health Education specialist, I circled back to programs in in 2021, serving as a Public Health Advisor in the Office on Smoking and Health. The opportunity to learn never ends at CDC, and you can reinvent yourself, retaining and adding to previous perspectives.
CDC’s work ripples out through communities all across this beautiful country. When we cut the states, some can’t sustain the work. When our work is cut short or altered, as it has been in 2025, it hurts not only CDC but also all of the agencies that we partner with and provide funding to, and the damage ripples down from there to small jurisdictions all over the country. When you hurt the CDC, you hurt the local nonprofit in rural Oklahoma.