Julia Smith-Easley

Julia Smith-Easley leads Community Engagement, Risk Communication, and Social Behavior Change (RCCE SBC) at CDC’s Global Health Center, Division of Global Health Protection. Her expertise is social behavioral change in humanitarian and global emergency settings.  Julia is also adjunct professor with Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health in the Department of Global Health. In this role, she developed and teaches Effectively Engaging Communities during Global Public Health Emergencies as part of CDC’s Complex Humanitarian Emergencies (CHE) program. She also teaches the RCCE SBC module for the Health in CHE and the Qualitative Methods module for the Epi Methods in CHE courses.

In addition to trainings as part of the CHE program, Julia has designed and provided trainings and technical assistance in RCCE SBC for Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Belize, Botswana, Caribbean Public Health member states, China, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Egypt, El Salvador, Estonia, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Georgia, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Japan, Lesotho, Malawi, Moldova, Mozambique, Namibia, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Panama, Poland, Romania, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Turkey, Ukraine, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

While with CDC’s Emergency Response and Recovery Branch, Julia led RCCE and SBC efforts for CDC’s Global Rapid Response Team (GRRT), Global WASH, Global Disease Detection Operations, Humanitarian Health, and Emergency Response Capacity Development efforts. From 2015 -2023, Julia served as GRRT Lead for the RCCE SBC Pillar where she mentored the ~600 GRRT surge responders from across CDC.  She also coordinated CDC’s Global Social Behavioral Science Community of Practice; a center-wide platform established to strengthen global SBS collaborative efforts.

From February through December 2024, Julia was detailed to CDC’s Office of Readiness and Response, Division of Readiness and Response Science, Community Based Solutions and Health Equity Branch (ORR/DRRS/CBSHE) as the Acting Team Lead to stand up the Behavioral Science, Community Mitigation, and Equity Team. This team works across the agency to build and strengthen CDC's emergency readiness and response capabilities that fully integrate behavioral science, health equity, and community engagement. During this time, Julia also co-led the RCCE technical area for the US 2024 Joint External Evaluation (JEE) that will be used to update the US National Action Plan for Public Health Security.

Julia has been with CDC since 1997.  She began her CDC career in the former National Center for Infectious Diseases as a behavioral scientist and health educator where she developed and coordinated partnerships and activities to support CDC health education programs and community engagement efforts.  In 2007, she joined CDC’s Division of Partnerships and Strategic Alliances as the Industry Partnerships Coordinator. In 2009, she led CDC’s Engaging Leaders pillar for the agency’s Healthiest Nation Initiative where she coordinated internal collaborative activities across CDC and facilitated partnerships with external organizations in the business, healthcare, government, education, sports/entertainment, faith-based, and community sectors. Julia joined CDC’s Global Health Center in 2010.