Chief Medical Officer
CDC
Scott Santibañez, MD, MPHTM is the Chief Medical Officer in the Division of Infectious DIsease Readiness and Innovation (DIDRI) in the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID).
Dr. Santibañez has considerable experience in emergency preparedness and response, having served on CDC’s Smallpox Clinical Team, as Chief Medical Officer during the Hurricane Katrina response, as Senior Advisor for Vulnerable Populations during the 2009-10 H1N1 influenza pandemic, as part of the leadership of the 2014 domestic Ebola response in Dallas, and on multiple COVID-19 tribal, southwest border, and vaccine confidence deployments. He served for over four years in the National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention where he was a project officer for an HIV prevention randomized controlled trial in for people who use injection drugs, led an investigation of a large HIV outbreak in Russia, and served as a team lead in that center’s Office of Health Disparities.
Dr. Santibañez joined CDC as an Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) Officer in 1999 where he focused on racial and ethnic disparities in infant mortality in the 60 largest US cities and also worked at a local county health department in Nebraska. He earned his MD from West Virginia University in 1994 and completed his Infectious Disease Fellowship and MPH and Tropical Medicine at Tulane University. He is board-certified in internal medicine and infectious diseases. He also holds a doctorate from seminary in which he focused on social justice and regularly provides primary care at a clinic for people experiencing homelessness in the westside of Atlanta.