Julie Gerberding
Julie Gerberding, MD, MPH, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), will give a lecture, titled “Confronting the Two-Headed Monster: Rescuing Health and the Economy from Crises,” at UCSF.
Often seen on the national news delivering information vital to ensuring that all Americans are safe and healthy, Gerberding will visit UCSF as part of the Chancellor’s Health Policy Lecture Series.
The campus community is invited to hear Gerberding’s talk on Tuesday, Dec. 9, at noon in Cole Hall on the UCSF Parnassus campus.
Prior to joining the CDC, Gerberding was a faculty member at UCSF and directed the Prevention Epicenter, a multidisciplinary research, training and clinical service program that focused on preventing infections in patients and their health care providers. She is a clinical professor of medicine at Emory University and an associate professor of medicine at UCSF.
Gerberding became the director of the CDC, the federal agency responsible for protecting the nation’s health, in July 2002. Under her leadership, the agency has improved its ability to quickly respond to public health emergencies, including an international outbreak of SARS, avian influenza and West Nile virus. The CDC also has responded to emergencies posed by natural disasters like hurricanes.
In addition, the CDC has been working to protect the nation from everyday ailments like heart disease, diabetes, stroke and injuries, as well as illness associated with obesity and tobacco use.
Gerberding derives her passion for health protection from her experience as a physician at the UCSF-affiliated San Francisco General Hospital, where she provided care to countless patients with preventable diseases. Her commitment to excellence in communication has resulted in her becoming a spokesperson the nation turns to in a time of crisis.
She earned a BA degree, magna cum laude, in chemistry and biology and an MD degree at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Gerberding then completed her internship and residency in internal medicine at UCSF, where she also served as chief medical resident before completing her fellowship in clinical pharmacology and infectious diseases. She earned an MPH degree at the University of California, Berkeley in 1990.
Gerberding has been chronicled in the pages of
Vogue, the
Wall Street Journal,
Glamour,
USA Today,
Redbook and the
Lancet. She was recognized in 2004 by
Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Since 2005,
Forbes magazine has named Gerberding one of the 100 most powerful women in the world. Gerberding is originally from Estelline, South Dakota. She resides in Atlanta with her husband, David Rose.
