Margaret Bourdeaux, MD, MPH is the Founding Director of the Health Security Policy Academy (HSPA) at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, an endeavor that engages the medical and public health practitioner community in biosecurity, health security, and global health policy research. HSPA is currently serving as a platform for the wider global health community to document, assess and formulate policy responses to the recent and extensive cuts to US’s global health programs.
Dr. Bourdeaux has served as a faculty affiliate at BKC since 2020, when she directed the Digital Pandemic Response project during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the course of the pandemic she worked with dozens of jurisdictions across the US on outbreak investigation and response, which led her to launch the Transmission Focused Outbreak Response and Mitigation (TRANSFORM) project that aims to restructure the US public health enterprise such that it resources and positions local medical and public health practitioners to quickly detect and respond to emerging health crises in their communities.
She has partnered extensively with the National Governors Association and the CDC in this work and serves on the Steering Committee of the Massachusetts Consortium for Pathogen Readiness (MassCPR), a consortium of medical schools and research institutions devoted to bridging the divide between medicine and public health and advancing pandemic research. Her global health work focuses on governing health systems and enhancing their resilience in crisis and conflict affected states.
Currently, she is the co-PI on a NATO Science for Peace and Security funded project, Enhancing the Resilience of Health Systems to Hybrid Warfare that aims to help NATO members and partner countries prepare their civilian health systems for hybrid warfare against Russia. She is faculty in Harvard Medical School’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. She is a pediatrician and internal medicine physician by training and holds an MPH from Harvard Chan School of Public Health and an MD from Yale Medical School. She has published extensively on health security policy in forums like Health Affairs, Foreign Policy, Health Security, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and NPR. She has presented her work in multiple forums, including the Munich Security Conference, World Health Assembly, and World Health Summit.
