Rochelle Walensky Biography
Rochelle Walensky (Rochelle Paula Walensky, MD, MPH) serves as Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She has been nominated by President-elect Joe Biden as the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Rochelle Walensky Age
She was born in 1969 in Peabody, Massachusetts, U.S.
Rochelle Walensky Nationality
Rochelle is an American national.
Rochelle Walensky Education
She received an AB summa cum laude in biochemistry and molecular biology from Washington University in St. Louis. She earned her MD from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She earned an MPH in clinical effectiveness from the Harvard School of Public Health in 2001 after participating in the Massachusetts General Hospital/Brigham and Women’s Hospital Infectious Diseases Fellowship Program.
Rochelle Walensky Parents
She is the daughter of Carol Bersoff-Bernstein and Edward H. Bersoff.
Rochelle Walensky Husband
Rochelle is married to Loren Walensky, a pediatric oncologist, cancer chemical biologist and director of the Harvard/MIT MD-PhD Program. He works at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute where he joined in 2003 as an attending physician in pediatric hematology/oncology and in 2006 he founded his cancer chemical biology research laboratory.
After Rochelle was nominated to the position of director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention he took to Twitter to congratulate her.
The love of my life for 25 years and counting @RWalensky has been nominated to lead @CDCgov at this critical moment. I am so grateful to @JoeBiden @KamalaHarris and @Transition46 for their faith in this truly remarkable woman. She will work tirelessly to protect & save lives.
— Loren Walensky (@LorenWalensky) December 7, 2020
Rochelle Walensky Children
She is a mother of three boys.
Rochelle Walensky Massachusetts General Hospital
Walensky serves as the chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital and a practicing Infectious Disease physician both at MGH and at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She joined MGH in 2000 as a graduate assistant at the medical walk-in unit. She later joined the infectious disease unit as an assistant in medicine and later as an assistant physician before she was promoted to the position of an associate physician.
In 2013 she became a physician at the infectious disease unit and in 2017 she became the chief of division of infectious disease.
She also serves as a co-director, medical practice evaluation center and also as director, program in epidemiology and outcomes research in infectious diseases.
Rochelle Walensky Harvard
Rochelle is a professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She joined Harvard University in 1998 as a research fellow and in 2001 she became an instructor at Harvard Medical School. She later became an assistant professor before being promoted to associate professor in 2007.
Rochelle Walensky HIV/ AIDS
Dr. Rochelle Walensky’s pioneering research has helped advance the national and global response to HIV/AIDS. She is recognized internationally for her work to improve HIV screening and care in South Africa. She is a past Chair of Office of AIDS Research Advisory Council at the National Institutes of Health, Chair-elect of the HIV Medical Association, and has previously served as an advisor to both the World Health Organization and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS.
In 2008 she won the Emerging Leader in HIV Research sponsored by the HIV Medical Association and the Infectious Disease Society of America.
Rochelle Walensky COVID-19
Dr. Rochelle is a member of Boston COVID-19 Advisory Board. In November she co-authored a paper published in Health Affairs in November 2020 that showed the factors that can affect the efficacy of a COVID-19 vaccine.
She is involved in a medical discussion on the best strategy to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and achieve herd immunity. She favors the John Snow Memorandum, which advocates an alternative, risk-based approach to the COVID-19 pandemic that involves “Focused Protection” of those most at risk and seeks to avoid or minimize the societal harm of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.
She says that “The Great Barrington Declaration is predicated on the idea that you know who is going to get sick and you can somehow isolate and protect them, but there is absolutely no evidence that we can do this … No-one is suggesting that lockdowns should be the default position. They are a last resort. But if we just let the virus run free without mitigation strategies, such as masking, our hospitals will overflow and that would mean we would no longer be able to take care of the population’s health across the board”.
Rochelle Walensky CDC
On December 7, 2020 President-elect Joe Biden nominated Dr. Rochelle Walensky as the new director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She will replace Dr. Robert Redfield, who assumed the role in March 2018.
In selecting @RWalensky, Biden has chosen one of the most respected infectious disease docs in the world. She has a long history working on HIV and has, in the past year, become a tour de force in addressing COVID. She’ll take the helm of CDC at perhaps its most critical moment. https://t.co/VtMNdLN06p
— Jen Kates (@jenkatesdc) December 7, 2020