Leadership

Public Health Surveillance and Informatics Program Office (proposed)

Division of Informatics Solutions and Operations

Robb Chapman, BA
Acting Director

In February 2010, Robb Chapman became acting director of the Division of Informatics Solutions and Operations, Public Health Surveillance and Informatics Program Office (proposed). In this position he has leadership over a stable of enterprise-level information technology (IT) systems. These systems provide core services to key public health functions, such as notifiable and syndromic surveillance programs and laboratory system interoperability.

Mr. Chapman has worked in the IT field since 1981. During that time, he served variously as a programmer, business analyst, system architect, capacity planner, project manager, supervisor, and dispute mediator. During the 1980s he worked first for the state of Georgia writing a new database system to manage the state’s unemployment insurance program and later for several private software companies producing business automation software.

He began his CDC career in 1989, modifying communication software for integration into CDC WONDER. At the time, CDC was beginning its transition from a mainframe to personal computers running DOS. Mr. Chapman became the default resident expert in dial-up modem software. As a result, he played a major role in conceiving WONDER e-mail. The wild popularity of this product was unforeseen by its developers. The new e-mail capability addressed a huge unmet need, and it had something of a transformative effect on public health IT in the United States. For Mr. Chapman, the experience was an instructive exercise in managing unanticipated consequences, as WONDER e-mail struggled for years to meet the surprising demand for it. In 1996, Mr. Chapman became branch chief responsible for WONDER within the Epidemiology Program Office, and he shepherded the system’s migration to the World Wide Web.

In 2002, he was recruited by CDC’s then Information Resources Management Office to lead an initiative to modernize the agency’s Web-based partner collaboration, emergency communications, and partner directory services. These were incorporated into the Public Health Information Network program when it commenced in 2003. Mr. Chapman spent the next 6 years negotiating and codifying new interoperability and data exchange standards with HAN coordinators, emergency responders, and others in state and local health departments and overseeing construction of CDC IT systems to meet these standards. As an early proponent of service-oriented architecture, he was responsible for some of CDC’s first operational Web services to serve and connect CDC and partner systems.

From 2007 to 2009 Mr. Chapman also undertook management of Secure Access Management Services. This involved overhauling CDC’s older Secure Data Network system, which was responsible for protecting sensitive CDC data and systems according to increasingly stringent federal IT security requirements. He played a leading role in a 2-year effort to establish a working CDC-wide solution to the problem of external-user identity management—a somewhat esoteric but especially difficult and delicate issue with serious effects on state and local partners.

Mr. Chapman was born in Lakewood, Ohio, spent most of his youth in New York and New Jersey, and has a bachelor-of-arts degree from Yale University. In his off hours he plays music as much as time will allow.