DR. JOANN SCHULTE NAMED
LOUISVILLE DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC
HEALTH AND WELLNESS
Dave Langdon
A
fter a 14-month national search,
Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer
named Dr. Joann Schulte the city’s
new public health director in late March.
“Dr. Schulte brings a wealth of public
health experience gained at the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and in such urban centers as Dallas and Atlanta,” said Fischer. “She is well-qualified to
build on the progress we have made toward making Louisville a
much healthier city.”
Board certified in general pediatrics and preventive medicine,
Dr. Schulte is a seasoned public health professional with extensive experience in epidemiology, toxicology and health communication. She comes to Louisville from Dallas where she served as
a Medical Toxicology Fellow at the North Texas Poison Control
Center at Parkland Memorial Hospital.
“I am tremendously happy to have the opportunity to serve in
Louisville,” said Dr. Schulte. “This position represents the culmination of my public health experience. I hope to bring all that
I have learned to build on the progress of my predecessors and
significantly improve the overall health of Louisville.”
“I think that I first learned about Louisville as a young girl of
about eight or nine,” said Schulte. “Somehow I learned that the
first Saturday in May is when the Kentucky Derby was run. So
the next year I watched it and wanted to know why the thorns in
the blanket of roses didn’t make the horse jump,” she said. “Like
many girls, I was horse mad for a while and wanted to be the first
girl jockey on the first filly to win the Derby. I was crushed to
learn that Regret was the filly who ran and won in 1916 with a
male jockey. Then I wanted to train a horse or own one. But we
weren’t rich. In fact, I was the first person in my family to go to
college. About then horse madness was over!”
Prior to her post in Dallas, Dr. Schulte was an Editorial Fellow
with the New England Journal of Medicine. Much of Dr. Schulte’s public health career has been spent as a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and
at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
During her time at the CDC, she investigated more than 100 dis-
ease outbreaks,
and worked in
the areas of vaccine-preventable
diseases, immunizations, HIV/
AIDS, sexually
transmitted diseases and tuberculosis. At the
NIH, Dr. Schulte
was the medical
epidemiologist
on a Phase III
trial to evaluate
the efficacy of
genital herpes
vaccine in women.
“I have an idea of what’s been done and is being done nationally,” Schulte said. “But I think the most effective public health is
what you can do at the local level.”
“Louisville is a city that acts: it doesn’t react,” said Schulte.
“Louisville is good at looking at itself and figuring out its problems–and it’s good at taking action once those problems are identified. I think that is pretty well documented with innovations like
the Healthy Louisville 2020 plan,” she said. “People from a broad
range of backgrounds, expertise and organizations worked on that
plan before it came out in 2014. There are real goals there and
they are based on real data.”
Dr. Schulte also has served as the chief of epidemiology for
HIV/AIDS for the Texas Department of State Health Services
and as acting state epidemiologist for the Florida Department of
Health and chief of its outbreak investigation unit. She was recognized in Florida for her work on public health issues related to
eight hurricanes that struck the state in a two-year period.
Dr. Schulte will also have a faculty appointment at the University of Louisville School of Public Health and Information Sciences, in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health.
(continued on page 8)
MAY 2016
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