Karen Hacker
Director, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Karen Hacker, MD, MPH, is the Director of CDC’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, where she oversees more than 1,000 staff dedicated to preventing chronic diseases and promoting health across the life span. Since her appointment, she has launched the community health worker and social determinant of health accelerator plan initiatives. She oversees a broad portfolio that includes Maternal Mortality, School health, obesity prevention, smoking policies and the leading chronic diseases. Dr. Hacker has a long history of public health practice at the local level having served as the Director of the Allegheny County Health Department in Pennsylvania and at the Cambridge Health Alliance in Massachusetts. Dr. Hacker has published extensively and is an expert in community-based participatory research (CBPR). She served as the Director of the CBPR program of the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Award Initiative and wrote Community-Based Participatory Action Research, a widely used academic text. She received her MD at Northwestern University and her MPH at Boston University School of Public Health.
