Kathleen Ethier

Kathleen A. Ethier is an American social psychologist and public health official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In 2016, she was appointed the Director of CDC's Division of Adolescent and School Health in the National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention. As of 2020, Ethier is also head of the CDC's community mitigation task force for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Biography Ethier received her bachelor of arts in psychology at the College of New Rochelle in 1986. She then received her PhD in social psychology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) in 1995, examining women's reaction to their initial pregnancy. She researched at Yale University for six years, working on the prevention of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases in women.

In 2020, as head of the CDC's COVID-19 community mitigation task force, researching non-pharmaceutical interventions to prevent spread of the virus, she was the lead author on a comparative study of cell phone usage – used as a measure of people's mobility – in the metropolitan areas of New York City, Seattle, New Orleans and the Bay Area after shelter-at-home orders were issued, which showed that a reduction in mobility was accompanied by a decrease in the growth rate of COVID-19 cases.

Selected publications

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