Biographies - Toxic Shock

Dr. Kathryn Shands was an EIS Officer at CDC from 1979 to 1981. She was Chief of the Toxic Shock Syndrome (TSS) Task Force from 1980 to 1981 and received a USPHS Commendation Medal for her work on TSS. She served as Acting Assistant Director for Science at CDC from 1981 to 1982 and then left CDC to pursue a career in clinic child psychiatry.
Dr. Shands received her MD degree from Boston University in 1977 and trained in Pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1977 to 1979. After leaving CDC in 1982, she trained in Adult, and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Emory University. After completing her training, she entered private practice in 1986; at the same time, she began training as a psychoanalyst, graduating in 1994. She had a very successful career as a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist in Atlanta until her partial retirement in 2008. Dr. Shands was listed numerous times in Atlanta Magazine’s annual list of “Best Doctors.” She also served as an Assistant Clinical Professor at Emory University, receiving an “Outstanding Educator” award in Child Psychiatry in 1993.
She is currently almost fully retired and splits her time between Decatur, Georgia, and Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts.

Arthur Reingold, MD, joined the EIS program in 1979 after completing medical school at the University of Chicago and his medical residency at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He served his first year as an EIS officer in the Connecticut State Health Department and his second year in the Special Pathogens Branch of the Bacterial Diseases Division. During that time he worked on Legionnaires’ disease, toxic shock syndrome, meningococcal meningitis, and other bacterial and fungal infections. He served as a Preventive Medicine Resident in the same branch, and then as Assistant Branch Chief. Dr. Reingold served for two years as CDC’s liaison to the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1987, he became Professor and Head of the school’s Division of Epidemiology.
Dr. Reingold holds academic appointments in the departments of Medicine, and Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UCSF. He served on WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on vaccines, and on CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. He has also served as President of the Society for Epidemiological Research and the American Epidemiological Society. In 2003, he was elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine/National Academy.

Gene W. Matthews, JD, serves as Senior Investigator at the North Carolina Institute for Public Health (NCIPH) at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health. He also directs the Southeastern Regional Office of the Network for Public Health Law funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Mr. Matthews previously served as chief legal advisor to CDC in Atlanta from 1979 to 2004, directing a legal staff that grew to 30 persons. During that 25-year span, he handled a wide range of precedent-setting public health law issues and litigated key public health lawsuits and civil discovery cases.