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Collette Fitzgerald, Member, CLSI

Collette Fitzgerald, PhD

Member, CLSI

Deputy Director for Science, Division of Laboratory Systems, Center for Surveillance, Epidemiology and Laboratory Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Dr. Collette Fitzgerald is the Acting Associate Director for Science (ADS) in the newly formed Office of Laboratory Systems and Response (OLSR) at CDC. She began her career in microbiology 32 years ago, across the pond, at the Health Protection Agency in London, where she gained a love for the laboratory and public health.

For the past 26 years, she has worked at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, GA. Eighteen of those years were spent working in the Enteric Diseases Laboratory Branch in the Division of Foodborne, Waterborne and Environmental Diseases, where she served as Chief of the National Enteric Reference and Outbreak Laboratory Team (NERO). Dr Fitzgerald’s strong leadership led NERO to enhance laboratory quality and safety, embrace whole genome sequencing (WGS) and Quality Management Systems (QMS).

In 2017, Dr. Fitzgerald joined the Division of Laboratory Systems (DLS) at CDC, where she led the Science and Evaluation Offices in the Office of the Director, in support of the DLS mission to improve public health, patient outcomes, and health equity by advancing clinical and public health laboratory quality and safety, data and biorepository science, and workforce competency. Since 2023 she has served as the Acting ADS in the Center for Laboratory Systems and Response, and is excited to move into a new acting ADS role in OLSR in Oct 2024 to support its mission to create a core laboratory infrastructure that provides operational and systems support to CDC and the nation’s public health and clinical laboratories.

Dr. Fitzgerald is currently CDC’S ex-officio on the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Advisory Committee (CLIAC), was a Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) Consensus Council board member (Nov 2019- Dec 2021) and has served on the CLSI Board of Directors since January 2022.

Dr. Fitzgerald earned her PhD in Molecular Microbiology from the University of Lancaster, UK, and a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry with Chemistry from the University of Southampton, UK.