Executive Leadership & Expert Bios

Rear Admiral Kenneth Castro, MD

Director, Division of Tuberculosis (TB) Elimination, NCHHSTP

 

Rear Admiral Kenneth Castro, MD is the director of Division of Tuberculosis (TB) Elimination in the National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention. In this role, Dr. Castro leads the team of experts devoted to TB elimination, prevention, control, and research activities in the US and throughout the world. Castro began his CDC career in 1983 as an Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) officer with the AIDS Program.

Since 1995, he has served as co-Chair of the U.S. Federal Tuberculosis Task Force. He is a founding member of the global Stop TB Partnership. He has provided global leadership in the development of a coordinated response to the urgent health problem of extensively drug resistant TB.

He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Puerto Rico; completed post-graduate studies at Northeastern University in Boston, and received his doctorate from the State University of New York at Stony Brook School of Medicine. Dr. Castro went on to complete postgraduate training at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. He completed a fellowship in infectious diseases at the Emory University School of Medicine, where his work focused on describing the increase in the number of people with TB and its association with the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

A native Puerto Rican, Castro speaks fluent Spanish, and served as advisor to the Puerto Rico Department of Health, the Pan American Health Organization, World Health Organization, and Ministries of Health in countries where TB and HIV constitute major public health problems. In 2008 Dr. Castro was recognized by the Hispanic Officers Advisory Committee, U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps with the prestigious Juan Carlos Finlay award.

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