Staff Bio
Brandi Limbago, PhD, is the acting director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD) at CDC.
Role at CDC
As acting director of NCIRD, Dr. Limbago leads CDC's efforts to detect, prevent, and respond to vaccine-preventable and respiratory infectious disease threats.
In her regular role, Dr. Limbago serves as the principal deputy director for NCIRD.
Previous experience
Prior to joining NCIRD, Dr. Limbago was part of the Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion, most recently as acting chief of the Clinical and Environmental Microbiology Branch
She joined CDC in 2005 as team lead for the Diagnostic Microbiology Laboratory. Later, she led the Antimicrobial Resistance and Characterization Laboratory.
In 2011, she became deputy chief of the Clinical and Environmental Microbiology Branch, which investigates health care-related outbreaks and studies the contribution of the health care environment to infection and spread of antibiotic resistance. Dr. Limbago’s research focused on characterization and detection of emerging antimicrobial resistance, and on the molecular epidemiology of healthcare-associated pathogens, including carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, Clostridium difficile, and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.
Dr. Limbago serves as a voting member of the Clinical Laboratory Standards Institute’s (CLSI) Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (AST) Subcommittee. She is co-chair of the CLSI AST Methodology work group.
Education
Dr. Limbago graduated from the College of Idaho with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and zoology. She graduated from Emory University with a doctoral degree in microbiology and molecular genetics. She completed a training fellowship in Clinical and Public Health Microbiology Leadership at the University of Washington, where she served as acting director of the molecular diagnostics section.