Our Impact
DWD’s work maintains a steady flow of fellows ready to launch their public health careers. This pipeline of young professionals provides critical technical assistance to our public health partners. Our accredited training services—offered for free—save public health professionals millions of dollars in fees.
By the Numbers (As of September 2022)
*This does not include technical assistance requests to support the COVID19 response.
+CDC TRAIN is CDC’s external learning management system—an affiliate of the Public Health Foundation’s TRAIN Learning Network—available to learners across the public health community
Real Stories, Real Impact
Developing Future Leaders Through Fellowships
Victoria Phifer, MPH is a 2015 alum of the Presidential Management Fellows (PMF) Program at CDC. Victoria worked as a Public Health Analyst in CDC’s Washington, D.C. office. She completed two rotations as part of her fellowship, one in CDC’s Office of the Associate Director for Policy and Strategy, and one with a national non-profit organization. She also served as the liaison for PMF leadership, where she helped improve the program, implement community service, and mentor incoming fellows. Victoria currently serves CDC as a Health Equity Officer for the National Center for State, Tribal, Local, and Territorial Public Health Infrastructure and Workforce.
Strengthening the Public Health Workforce Through National Service
AmeriCorps and CDC have partnered to launch Public Health AmeriCorps, which in its first year will recruit 3,000 members to serve at state and local organizations. These AmeriCorps members will assist in areas such as building capacity at state and local public health agencies to serve medically underserved communities, supporting COVID-19 response and recovery efforts, increasing access to healthy food, and providing support to individuals working to overcome substance use disorders.
Helping Public Health Agencies Solve Data Challenges
Federal, state, local, tribal, territorial or global public health agencies can request short-term technical assistance through an Informatics Aid (Info Aid), which connects agencies to CDC’s Public Health Informatics Fellowship Program (PHIFP) fellows, who apply their expertise to investigating data management needs. Projects completed by PHIFP fellows include a workflow analysis of a state hepatitis C virus registry, development of a data summarization and visualization tool to support the COVID-19 response in the World Health Organization African Region, and an automated system to merge and streamline data related to Zika virus.