Office of Science (OS) (ACTING)
Paul Muntner, PhD, MHS, is the Acting Director of CDC’s Office of Science (OS). In this capacity, Dr. Muntner is critical to helping ensure OS advances its strategic and programmatic priorities to support the agency’s science.
Prior to joining CDC, Dr. Muntner was a Professor and Associate Dean for Research, and the former Director of the Lister Hill Center for Health Policy, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Also, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, he served as the Co-director of the Pharmacoepidemiology and Economics Research Unit and the Hypertension Research Center. From 2000 to 2007, Dr. Muntner served as an Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. From 2007 to 2009, he served as an Associate Professor of Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
Dr. Muntner led the National Institute of Health-funded Jackson Heart Study Hypertension Working Group and was a member of the Antihypertensive Lipid-Lowering Treatment to Prevent Heart Attack Trial (ALLHAT) steering committee. From 2015 to 2020, he served as the Director of an American Heart Association-funded Strategically Focused Research Network hypertension center, and he led the Statistical Core for the American Heart Association’s Health Equity Research Network to Prevent Hypertension and the Training Core for the American Heart Association’s Health Equity Research Network to Prevent Maternal Morbidity and Mortality. From 2015 to 2018, he was Vice Chair of the Statistics Committee for the American Heart Association, he chaired the 2019 American Heart Association Scientific Statement on Blood Pressure Measurement, and he was a member of the group developing the 2017 American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Guideline for the Prevention, Detection, Evaluation, and Management of High Blood Pressure in Adults.
Dr. Muntner’s research has been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, Annals of Internal Medicine, and Circulation, and has been featured on CNN and in the New York Times and Washington Post.
Dr. Muntner received his doctorate in epidemiology from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in 2001. He also holds a Master of Health Science degree in biostatistics from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.