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Jennifer E. Layden

Associate Dean for Practice, Professor

MD, PhD

Additional info:

Jennifer Layden, MD, PhD, is the associate dean for practice and a professor at Bursky School of Public Health. As the associate dean for practice, she leads the Bursky School’s efforts to grow partnerships that bridge the school’s academic expertise and scientific discoveries with community-centered needs, decreasing the time from discovery to impact and providing a bi-directional conduit for knowledge sharing and opportunity development. The Office of Practice strives to implement agile, new ways of partnering to positively impact communities’ health and well-being locally, nationally and globally.

An infectious diseases physician and epidemiologist, she began her career in academia before moving into governmental public health leadership roles at the state, city, and federal levels. Before joining the Bursky School, Layden served as senior vice president at the Association for State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO), where she expanded public-private partnerships to support health department capacity and oversaw efforts to strengthen data modernization, workforce, and infrastructure across state and territorial health departments. 

Prior to ASTHO, she served as a senior executive and inaugural director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Office of Public Health, Data, Surveillance and Technology, where she led the agency’s Data Modernization Initiative — a landmark effort to transform the nation’s public health data systems. During her tenure, she successfully oversaw an increase in legislative funding and nationwide expansion of near real-time data reporting and analytic capacity. Earlier, she served as deputy commissioner and chief medical officer for the Chicago Department of Public Health, where she was the incident manager for the city’s COVID-19 response; and as state epidemiologist and chief medical officer for the Illinois Department of Public Health, overseeing statewide public health responses, disease surveillance efforts, and providing scientific leadership across numerous public health programs.

Layden earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Notre Dame and her medical degree and doctorate in epidemiology from the University of Illinois at Chicago before completing clinical training in internal medicine and infectious disease. She has received numerous awards for public health leadership and scientific achievements, including the CDC’s Charles C. Shepard Science Award. She previously held faculty positions at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Loyola University Chicago, where she led national and global research efforts on viral hepatitis transmission, treatment response, and disease progression. Her research interests include infectious disease prevention and epidemiology, community-centered research, as well as improving public health national surveillance, informatics and response efforts.

Areas of focus:

  • Public health practice
  • Community partnerships
  • Public health data modernization
  • Infectious diseases epidemiology and responses

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