Office of the Director - Director's Profile

Stephan Monroe, Ph.D., serves as Director, Division of High Consequence Pathogens and Pathology (DHCPP) in the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Dr. Monroe was selected for the position in August 2007, having served as acting director since November 2005. He was previously associate director for laboratory science.

Dr. Monroe began his career at CDC in 1987 as a National Research Council fellow in the viral gastroenteritis section in the Division of Viral and Rickettsial Diseases (DVRD), the precursor to DHCPP. He spent the next seventeen years studying the biology and molecular epidemiology of enteric viruses, particularly astrovirus and norovirus. He was instrumental in defining the properties that lead to the formal classification of astroviruses as a new virus family and served as chair of the first Astroviridae study group of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses. He pushed the development and implementation of real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) assays for detecting and characterizing noroviruses and provided formal and informal hands-on training to numerous collaborators in state health department laboratories. In 1998, he received the Pekka Halonen Award in diagnostic virology.

Dr. Monroe holds a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Washington University, St. Louis, and a B.S. in biochemistry from Iowa State University. He completed a post-doctoral fellowship in virology at the University of Wisconsin prior to moving to CDC.

Dr. Monroe is the co-author of over 120 scientific manuscripts and book chapters and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Clinical Microbiology.

Dr. Monroe's wife, Marty, is also a CDC employee and together they have three children and one grandchild. In his spare time he enjoys bicycling and working on community projects in the City of Decatur.