Fall 2026
Public Health Haven
By Ellie Pourbohloul
Photography by Erik Meadows
How the HPM Scholars program turned decades of public health knowledge into opportunities for teaching, mentorship, and research.
It all started over dinner at Department of Health Policy and Management (HPM) faculty member Fred Shaw’s
home. Stephen Patrick, MD, newly named chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management, had come for a meet and greet with other Rollins School of Public Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) colleagues.
That room was full of Epidemic Intelligence Service officers, the “disease detectives” placed all over the world whom Patrick had long known about and idolized. What stayed with him was how much knowledge was sitting in that room. He started thinking about how he could better connect Rollins students with their expertise.
Then came the spring of 2025. People Patrick knew across the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), some of them former colleagues within HPM, started getting reassigned to jobs that didn’t exist, assigned to administrative leave, or let go. Patrick watched friends who had spent distinguished careers in public service lose their jobs in quick succession, as well as the loss of critical public health expertise that they had spent decades building.
Over the course of several months, Patrick received daily emails from people separated from federal service who wanted to know how they could continue contributing their expertise to Rollins. After the first week of April, when thousands were laid off from HHS, Patrick knew he wanted to act. Rollins could offer them concrete resources—like affiliation with the school, access to libraries and resources, and space to collaborate with students and faculty. Thus, the idea for the HPM Scholars program was born.
“The Scholars program was a landing place during that time and a way to contribute to the next generation of public health professionals.”
Sarah Loch
Co-Director, HPM Scholars Program
“A lot of their careers ended so abruptly,” says Sarah Loch, who co-directs the HPM Scholars program with Patrick. “Some found themselves transitioning to public health careers in different sectors while others opted for retirement. The Scholars program was a landing place during that time and a way to contribute to the next generation of public health professionals, which is what drove them to join.”
The first cohort came together almost entirely through word of mouth, with areas of focus informed entirely by the Scholars. The program formally launched in July 2025 with 16 former federal health officials whose expertise spans health policy, public health administration, health services research, public health law, maternal and child health, and behavioral and mental health policy and over 300 years of collective public health experience at the local, state, and federal levels.
Building on Core Strengths
HPM is grounded in its deep commitment to rigorous research that moves policy, quality, and access to care. Faculty research topics include Medicaid coverage and enrollment, maternal morbidity, mental health service use, cancer care delivery and the drivers of health care spending, and physician performance. Faculty publish work that lands in top peer-reviewed journals of the field, and that has influence in a broad array of media outlets shaping policy.
It is also a department that has a history of making practitioners accessible to students through guest lectures and collaborations with those working in health systems and health care management organizations—whether in classrooms, degree programs, or teaching professors working in the health system. The department’s Master of Health Administration program, for instance, has been designed in partnership with Goizueta Business School and Emory Healthcare, with direct access to executives serving as mentors.
The gap the Scholars program fills for the department and school is access to a standing group of senior experts who oversaw federal centers, health departments, and surveillance systems. They are appointed rather than invited, holding three-year adjunct or secondary appointments that make them accessible long term, and are available for mentorship, teaching, public conversation, and guidance for students within and outside of the department.
Karen Hacker
Karen Hacker, MD, is Rollins' inaugural policy fellow in residence, a one-year appointment that places a public health leader alongside faculty and students to share real-world experience, mentor future leaders, and spark applied research. Hacker is the former director of the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion at CDC, which housed nine divisions, a staff of 1,000, and a budget of $1.4 billion.
Over the course of her residency, Hacker has worked with HPM to conceptualize, facilitate, and bring to life health policy-related programming through the Policy & Practice Forum and other channels. She is also working with HPM faculty members to examine clinical data from electronic health records related to hypertension and validate them against public health surveys.
She serves as senior adviser for public health practice and strategy for the department, helping connect the pragmatic, experiential backgrounds of the Scholars to Rollins programming and students newly entering the field. This enables the Scholars to be increasingly available to students who want guidance, research assistance, or mentorship. She also helps solidify the department’s connections with local community-based organizations. In January, she will end her role early as she takes on the position as president and CEO of the National Network of Public Health Institutes.
“I am interested in strengthening HPM's connection to the Atlanta community, facilitating inroads for students who want real-life public health experiences,” says Hacker. “I think HPM can greatly contribute to community health in addition to the world-renowned and nationally ranked research program it is already known for. My background is in community-based participatory research, so I am eager to bring that expertise into the Emory experience.”
Skill-Building Opportunities and Public-Facing Expertise
Table Talks are the program's steadiest point of contact with students. These close conversations happen for Rollins students several times per semester and involve an invited Scholar sitting down with students to discuss public health careers or a timely aspect of federal, state, or local public health. They typically focus on engaging HPM students but are sometimes open to students in other departments or students focusing in specific content areas, depending on the topic.
The past year gives a sense of the range of topics. Martin Meltzer, PhD, and John Glasser, PhD, walked students through building epidemiological models that health officials use in their day-to-day work. Ben Truman, MD, spoke on preventing suicide across generations. Karen Hacker, MD, led a conversation about skill-building and opportunities in local public health. Karen Remley, MD, covered crisis communication in public health.
“Bringing the Scholars’ experiences to Rollins so they could share their expertise with our community is really at the center of our vision for the program,” says Loch. “We wanted to create a public health home where we could support them in pursuing their interests and, at the same time, create opportunities for the Rollins community to learn from and collaborate with this accomplished group at a time of significant change in public health."
The Policy and Practice Forums are large-scale events open to the Emory community and external partners whose topics are decided on each year by consensus of the Scholars, allowing the series to remain relevant to public health topics and driven by the group’s diverse expertise. Last year's three forums were loosely themed on what federal changes would mean for different parts of the field—including one on maternal and child health, another on guidance for local public health leaders navigating the future of public health, and a third on Medicaid changes and rural health transformation.
Three scholars who departed from federal service, Carrie Shapiro-Mendoza, PhD; Lee Warner, PhD; and Hacker have recently launched a Leadership Coaching Circle, which is a semester-long opportunity that will provide free professional coaching to a small cohort of HPM students selected through an application process. Shapiro-Mendoza and Warner each earned executive coaching certificates through Emory's Goizueta Business School and offer a unique perspective on conventional leadership coaching based on their decades-long careers in public health practice.
Carrie Shapiro-Mendoza
As former chief of the Field Support Branch in CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health, Carrie Shapiro-Mendoza has deeply valued the opportunity to contribute to departmental programming and build relationships with students around issues that matter to them—whether through guest lecturing, serving as a dissertation adviser, offering guidance on student practicums, helping students learn about emerging career paths, or diving deeper into specific topic areas of interest within maternal and child health.
Shapiro-Mendoza also describes the importance of the Scholars program in helping her rebuild her professional identity.
“The HPM Scholars program gave me something I did not fully appreciate I needed at the time: a professional home,” she says. “Serving as a speaker and panelist at public health conferences while being able to represent Emory and Rollins mattered. It allowed me to reintroduce myself professionally not in terms of what I had lost, but in terms of the expertise and work I was continuing to bring forward. This role has given me the structure and confidence to continue to show up in those national conversations while also beginning to imagine a broader professional identity for myself.”
Over the next year with the leadership coaching circle, she looks forward to preparing the next generation of public
health leaders to step into more responsibility and more senior roles over time. She wants to help them develop the judgment, confidence, and sense of purpose they will need to lead programs that are responsive to community needs.
“It is so valuable for students to have access to people who have spent years working in public health practice—sometimes what they need is not another lecture, but someone to help them think through possibilities, share what a career looks like over time, and encouragement to consider paths not yet imagined.”
Looking Ahead
A program that began as a response to a particular moment in public health has become something the department is growing steadily each year. As more practitioners come in from federal, state, and local service, the range of what Scholars can offer students, the school, and the broader community grows larger.
“Our students benefit from their wisdom and mentorship, our department is stronger because of their presence.”
Stephen Patrick, MD
Chair, Department of Health Policy and Management
“We created the HPM Scholars program at a moment when an extraordinary amount of experience and talent risked being lost from public service,” says Patrick. “Our opportunity was to bring those leaders into our community and connect them with the next generation. What has been remarkable is not only the depth of experience they bring, but the passion they still have for serving others. Our students benefit from their wisdom and mentorship, our department is stronger because of their presence, and together we are finding new ways for a lifetime of public service to continue serving the community.”
Explore More Stories
Rollins Magazine is published twice a year by the Rollins School of Public Health, a component of the Woodruff Health Sciences Center of Emory University, for alumni and friends of the school.