Lyle Petersen | Director of the Division of Vector-Borne Diseases, NCEZD
CDC

Lyle R. Petersen, M.D., M.P.H., has served as the director of the Division of Vector-borne Diseases at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control since 2004. Dr. Petersen began his training at the University of California, San Diego where he received an undergraduate degree in biology. He studied medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and completed an internal medicine internship and residency at Stanford University. He then joined Tulane University’s tropical medicine research efforts in Cali, Colombia before starting CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) applied epidemiology training program in 1985. After his EIS training at the Connecticut State Health Department, he joined the CDC’s Division of HIV/AIDS where he worked until 1995. During that time, he completed CDC’s Preventive Medicine Residency Program, received an MPH degree from Emory University, and served in several posts, including the Chief of the HIV Seroepidemiology Branch. From 1996 to February 2000, Dr. Petersen guided Germany’s efforts in creating a new national infectious disease epidemiology program at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin. From 2000 to 2003, he served as the Deputy Director for Science of the Division of Vector-borne Diseases. He is the author of more than 200 scientific publications.

Dr. Petersen has been the recipient of several scientific awards including the Charles B. Shepard Science Award, the Alexander D. Langmuir Award, James H. Nakano Citation, the Larry J. Anderson Award for Outstanding Public Health Service, and twice the HHS Secretary’s Award for Distinguished Service. He served on the National Security Staff at the White House in 2015 and in 2016 was the Incident Manager of the Zika Response at the CDC. He is a fellow of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and has served on its Scientific Program Committee. He is a past president of the Society of Vector Ecology. Dr. Petersen’s current research focuses on the epidemiology of arboviral and bacterial vector-borne zoonoses.