Executive Leadership & Expert Bios

Wanda D. Barfield, MD, MPH, FAAP, Captain, U.S. Public Health Service

Director, Division of Reproductive Health, NCCDPHP

Wanda Barfield, MD, MPH, FAAP serves as director of the Division of Reproductive Health within the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.  She has held this position since June 2010.  As director, she leads a committed team of professionals who strive to achieve optimal and equitable reproductive health for all through CDC’s Safe Motherhood and Infant Health Initiative.  The division’s top priorities are women’s reproductive, pregnancy, and infant health.  This includes teen pregnancy prevention, a CDC Winnable Battle. 

Dr. Barfield joined CDC in 2000 as part of its Epidemic Intelligence Service where she worked in perinatal health, with a focus on racial disparities.  In 2003, she was assigned to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health as a CDC Maternal and Child Health (MCH) Epidemiology Field Assignee where she focused on integrating public health and clinical services to improve regionalized perinatal systems of care.  She returned to Atlanta in 2006 to become Senior Scientist and later, Team Leader for the CDC Maternal and Child Health Epidemiology Program.  She has built and strengthened numerous strategic partnerships with MCH organizations. 

Dr. Barfield received her medicine and public health degrees from Harvard University.  She completed a pediatrics residency at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and a neonatal-perinatal medicine fellowship at Harvard’s Joint Program in Neonatology (Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Beth Israel Hospital, and Children’s Hospital, Boston). 

Dr. Barfield is Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and Emory School of Medicine.  She is a Fellow in the American Academy of Pediatrics and serves as the CDC Liaison to the AAP’s Committee on Fetus and Newborn.  Her research includes over 60 peer-review publications in perinatal mortality and early child health services utilization; improving access to risk-appropriate perinatal services; and advancing the quality of women’s, maternal, and child health data through longitudinal linkage, with a focus on disparities.  She is board-certified in both General Pediatrics and Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine, and still provides care to critically ill newborns.

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