Associate Director of the Office of Policy, Planning, and Communication

Aliki Pappas Weakland, MPH, MSW, BA

Aliki Pappas Weakland, MPH, MSW, BA serves as the Associate Director for the Office of Policy, Planning and Communication (OPPC) in the Office of Readiness and Response (ORR).

Aliki has dedicated her career to supporting people, programs and organizations striving to improve the health and lives of others on local, national, and global scale. She is a purposeful strategist with expertise and leadership in cross-cutting organizational initiatives realizing broad reach and impact. Aliki has a passion for cultivating and maintaining relationships and connecting people and ideas for success. She has worked extensively in public health and social services, across a wide range of public/private settings and in the US Government context.

Recently, Aliki served as Deputy Incident Manager of the COVID-19 Emergency Response through the expiration of the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency and transition to a center-led response. Prior to that, for two years Aliki was lead of Policy, Public Health Partnerships (and Communication) on the State, Tribal, Local and Territorial Support (STLT) Task Force on CDC’s COVID-19 Response. Aliki has a long history with CDC, first joining the agency as a Presidential Management Intern (Fellow) in the late 1990s. She has worked at CDC in chronic disease prevention and health promotion, birth defects prevention, and immunization and respiratory viruses. In addition to her work at CDC, Aliki directed two global public health consulting groups where she led coordination and management of broad-reach projects, built sustainable collaboration among partners and organizations, and provided evaluation of and strategic guidance for public health policy and program improvement at global scale.

Aliki received an MPH in health policy and management from Emory University, Rollins School of Public Health, an MSW in social service administrative practice from Florida State University, and a BA in political science from the University of Connecticut. She resides in Atlanta, Georgia, with her spouse and is a fan of good food and good reads, loves watching European political and crime dramas, and was thrilled recently when she reached “Queen Bee” on the New York Time Spelling Bee. She considers her two (now grown) children to be the best gifts she has ever received and remains completely enamored with her Boston Terrier.