Director

Institutional context

Cohen is the second consecutive woman to serve as Director of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, after Rochelle Walensky (2021–2023). Her appointment makes the CDC, alongside the State Department, an institution where consecutive female senior leaders have followed without an intervening male tenure.

Career path

Cohen earned a BS from Cornell, an MD from Yale School of Medicine, and an MPH from Harvard. She practised internal medicine before entering federal health-policy roles, including service at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services as Chief Operating Officer (2014–2017). She served as Secretary of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services from 2017 to 2021, leading the state's COVID-19 response. After leaving state government she was a senior executive at Aledade, a value-based-care company.

Appointment

President Biden announced her appointment as CDC Director in June 2023. She took office on 10 July 2023, succeeding Walensky. She left office on 20 January 2025 with the change of administration.

Tenure

One year and six months. Tenure included the agency's continued post-COVID restructuring, response to the H5N1 avian-influenza detections in dairy cattle in 2024, and updated guidance on respiratory illnesses.

Cluster context

Cohen's appointment continues the most analytically consequential single-institution pattern in the cluster: two consecutive female Directors at the CDC during and immediately after the most contested public-health regulatory period in the agency's modern history. The pattern is described in the dataset's principal-cluster discussion and in the analysis page.

Sources

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — Past Directors
• North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services — Past Secretaries