Rachel Eidex, PhD

Dr. Rachel Barwick Eidex, MS, PhD, is Branch Chief of the Travelers’ Health Branch in CDC’s Division of Global Migration Health (DGMH). She leads CDC’s travel medicine, traveler health surveillance, and traveler-facing risk communication activities. Her work focuses on protecting travelers, migrants, refugees, and other globally mobile populations and using travel-associated data to strengthen early detection of emerging infectious disease threats. Dr. Eidex has more than two decades of leadership experience in migration health, global health security, outbreak response, and disease surveillance. She began her public health career as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer in CDC’s Division of Parasitic Diseases and later worked with The Carter Center on neglected tropical disease control in Africa. She returned to CDC in 2002 as an epidemiologist in the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine, where she led yellow fever activities and later served as Associate Director for Science. From 2007-2025, Dr. Eidex has held multiple CDC leadership roles overseas, including establishing and leading DGMH’s Africa Program in Nairobi, directing CDC’s Global Disease Detection Program in South Africa, and serving as the first Director of the Division of Global Health Protection in Tanzania. Dr. Eidex holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from the State University of New York at Binghamton and both an MS and PhD in veterinary epidemiology from Cornell University.