Sarah Luna, PhD (EIS ’16) died in a plane crash May 20, 2019 traveling to a rural health clinic in Alaska as part of her duties as a senior epidemiologist with the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, a position she took after finishing EIS in the summer of 2018. Sarah served as an EISO in the Division of Foodborne, Waterborne and Environmental Diseases, where she worked on outbreaks of foodborne illness in places as varied as a small town on the Utah-Arizona border and a Marine Corps Recruit Depot in California.

During the inaugural TED-style session at the 2018 EIS conference, Sarah delivered an insightful and inspirational talk titled, Food Behind Bars: When Food Safety Isn’t Enough, unveiling the broad consequences of our failure to provide adequate nutrition to incarcerated individuals in the United States. To honor Sarah’s indomitable spirit and unwavering commitment to public health and the underserved, the EIS program will name future TED-style sessions at the annual EIS conference the Sarah Luna Memorial TED-style Sessions.

Sarah meant many things to many people. She was a daughter, sister, best friend, dance partner, nutritionist, epidemiologist, EIS classmate-turned-family-member, coworker, SAS tutor, roommate, Lieutenant, and so much more. She was funny, brilliant, tenacious, optimistic, and thoughtful. She cared more about her family and friends than we can ever know. She was the glue of an EIS class. She spent her life in service to others and died in her commitment to that service.

Your gift to the CDC Foundation will honor Sarah’s legacy by helping fund a scholarship in her name that will create opportunities for young people and early career scientists to advance public health for years to come.

Sara Lowther began her public health career at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, where she completed a Master of Public Health degree while serving as a project assistant in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) HIV/AIDS Surveillance Branch. After graduation, Sara served as fellow at CDC, providing surveillance coordination for the Respiratory and Enteric Viruses Branch. This work solidified her interest in pursuing doctoral studies in epidemiology at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health. After completing her doctorate degree, Sara began her career with the United States Public Health Service in July 2008 as an Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) officer assigned to the Minnesota Department of Health. Following EIS, she worked as a research scientist in the Division of Viral Hepatitis and, in 2011, moved to the Global Immunization Division (GID). Sara was an integral member of the CDC Kenya Country Office, first serving as GID’s program director for polio and immunization activities, and then becoming the Division of Global Health Protection’s (DGHP) Resident Advisor for the Field Epidemiology Training Program (FETP). She returned to Atlanta in 2019, bringing her expertise and country experience to her leadership role in DGHP.

When she passed away, she was acting lead of the Epidemiology Technical Support Unit for the FETP Team in the Workforce and Institute Development Branch. Sara was passionate about FETP as a means to develop and mentor young field epidemiologists around the world and build global field epidemiology capacity.

Infectious disease prevention and training future public health leaders were causes important to Sara throughout her career. The Sara Lowther Memorial Fund will support an award for a FETP fellow or recent graduate to conduct a project that makes significant contributions to infectious disease prevention and control in their country. The award will be presented annually at International Night during the EIS conference. Support the Sara Lowther Field Epidemiology Training Program (FETP) Memorial Fund.

A Memorial Fund honoring Chris Kochtitzky who died May 3, 2020, will focus on building the bridge between urban planning and public health. Chris lived and breathed urban planning and public health—it was his life. This fund will celebrate and continue his tireless work and commitment to this field. Chris knew just how important the built environment was in terms of limiting or enabling a person and a community to lead their collective most healthy life. Chris started at CDC as a presidential management intern in 1992. Over the next 28 years, he worked in a variety of policy and programmatic positions at ATSDR, NCEH, and NCBDDD and NCCDPHP. 

In 2006, he was appointed by former CDC Director Julie Gerberding, MD, to lead the healthy community goal team, where he served until 2009. Chris was also one of the founders of the field of built environment and health at CDC. He published an influential MMWR on the subject in 2006, helped organize CDC’s Built Environment and Health Group in 2008, and was a key contributor to the Surgeon General’s Call to Action to Promote Walking and Walkable Communities in 2015. Most recently, he was a driving force in organizing the Transportation Research Board (TRB), Conference on Active Transportation and Health. His work in this area supported TRB’s decision to create a Committee on Transportation and Health in February, a seminal moment in the field.

Posthumously in June 2020, Chris received the Jonathan E. Fielding Community Guide Champion Award. He was a tireless advocate for The Community Guide and evidence-based decision making. He served as a member of the systematic review team for combined built environment approaches to increase physical activity, also helped disseminate the recommendations to varied audiences, including nontraditional public health partners.

Most importantly, Chris befriended and maintained relationships with so many people inside and outside the agency. He was a generous, caring friend and a tenacious public health professional pursuing his life and work with vigor, charm, wisdom, and intelligence. His death is a major loss for his friends, his field, and for the CDC’s public health work.  

Larry Gilstrap, III, MD, served the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ABOG) for 10 years as the Director of Evaluation and Executive Director. The focus of his career was maternal-fetal medicine with a special emphasis on infectious diseases in women and in pregnancy. His passion is transforming clinical research into clinical practice improvements. He authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications, more than 100 chapters and several major textbooks. When Dr. Gilstrap retired in 2017, ABOG partnered with the CDC Foundation and CDC to establish this fellowship to honor his academic and public health career. The fellowship recipient works for one year at CDC in the areas of infectious disease, sexually transmitted disease and reproductive health in women.

This named fund was established in 1999 through a generous donation from Richard E. Hoffman, MD, MPH, EIS ’78. This fund is used to honor the career of the late Dr. Jonathan M. Mann. To this end, funds are used in support of the annual Jonathan M. Mann Memorial Lecture. This lecture is administered by the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) during their annual conference.

Jonathan Max Mann, MD, MPH, EIS '75, was called the “architect of the global mobilization against AIDS” for his role as the founding director of the World Health Organization’s Global Program on AIDS. But Dr. Jonathan Mann was also an accomplished state epidemiologist, serving the state of NewMexico in that capacity for nearly a decade, from 1975–1984.

The world lost one of its greatest public health allies when Dr. Mann lost his life in the Swissair plane crash off Nova Scotia in 1998. His wife, Dr. Mary Lou Clements-Mann, also died in the crash. He is survived by his mother, Ida Mann, and children, Naomi, Lydia and Aaron Mann.

Dr. Mann was instrumental in coalescing governments and individuals to view AIDS as a human rights concern as much as a public health issue, defining AIDS as a social problem to be solved.That action reflected a larger view that public health should be seen as interwoven into the social fabric. “Public health,” he wrote, “too often studies health without intruding upon larger, societal, inescapably value-laden issues.”

Dr. Mann’s life was replete with education and accomplishments. He had two degrees from Harvard and an MD from the Washington University School of Medicine. He was a former state epidemiologist and deputy director of the New Mexico Health Department. He was a former officer of CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, and he taught epidemiology and international health at the Harvard School of Public Health, where he also directed the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights. Dr. Mann also organized and directed the international collaborative AIDS Research Project in Kinshasa, Zaire.

The Jonathan M. Mann Memorial Lectureship is made possible annually by the CDC Foundation with proceeds from a generous gift from Richard E. Hoffman, MD, MPH, of Denver, Colorado.