The CDC Leaders

“Determine never to be idle. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.”

—Thomas Jefferson

Denise Koo, MD, MPH

Acting Director, Career Development Division
Office of Workforce & Career Development

Denise Koo, MD, MPH, is the Acting Director of the Office of Workforce and Career Development (OWCD). In this position she leads the CDC program responsible for improving health outcomes by ensuring a competent and sustainable workforce through excellence and innovation in workforce and career development.

Prior to assuming this position, Dr. Koo served as the Director, Career Development Division, Office of Workforce and Career Development (OWCD), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This division houses several key CDC training and workforce development programs with a total of nearly 400 trainees each year, including the Epidemic Intelligence Service, an Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME)-accredited preventive medicine residency; the Public Health Prevention Service; Public Health Informatics fellowship; Prevention Effectiveness fellowship; electives for medical and veterinary students; The CDC Experience fellowship in applied epidemiology for medical students; and is the CDC lead for the Emerging Leader, Presidential Management Fellows Programs, as well as a new pilot Senior Executive Service fellowship.

Dr. Koo graduated from Harvard University in 1984 with a B.A. in biochemical sciences. After combining medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, with an M.P.H. in epidemiology at University of California, Berkeley, she completed a primary care internal medicine residency at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

She then entered CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) and was assigned to the California Department of Health Services from 1991-1993.

Subsequent to EIS, Dr. Koo served as a preventive medicine resident in CDC’s Foodborne and Diarrheal Diseases Branch. She then took a job as chief of the CDC branch responsible for operation of the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System, in the Division of Public Health Surveillance and Informatics, in 1994. Dr. Koo became director of this same division, in the Epidemiology Program Office (EPO), three years later, in 1997.

In 2001, Dr. Koo became the EPO Associate Director for Science. In this position the CDC Director also tasked her with responsibility for CDC implementation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act Privacy Rule.

Dr. Koo became Director, Division of Applied Public Health Training at CDC in November 2002, re-organized 2 years later as the Career Development Division. Dr. Koo obtained board certification in internal medicine and preventive medicine.