A conversation with CDC Director Rochelle P. Walensky Walensky, a School of Medicine alum, discusses her time at Hopkins and shares her vision for caring for the nation beyond the COVID-19 pandemic By Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson / Published April 30, 2021 On December 7 of 2020, when President Biden's transition team announced that Rochelle P. Walensky was slated to become the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the medical and public health communities cheered the choice. Image caption: Rochelle Walensky Walensky has a reputation for sage and insightful research, and as the chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, she had been on the front lines of testing and treating deadly viruses for decades. Walensky received her Doctor of Medicine degree from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1995, and for the next three years she trained at Johns Hopkins Hospital during a critical period of HIV and AIDS research and treatment. She credits that time with setting her on the path to studying infectious diseases and, ultimately, to her work at the CDC. (She also credits Hopkins with her family life: She met her husband, Loren, while they were both studying here—Loren Walensky received his medical degree from the School of Medicine in 1997. They now have three children.)