Deborah Porterfield, MD, MPH, FACPM Regent-at-Large

Deborah Porterfield, MD, MPH, FACPM, is a Senior Advisor and Medical Officer in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In this role, she oversees policy research and evaluation focused on high-priority public health topics.

Before joining HHS, Dr. Porterfield contributed to the COVID-19 response at the North Carolina Division of Public Health. Prior to the pandemic, she served as an Associate Professor at the UNC School of Medicine, where she directed the Preventive Medicine Residency Program for nearly 20 years. During that time, she also conducted public health systems research and evaluations—primarily for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—as a visiting research scientist at RTI International.

Dr. Porterfield earned her medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco, and completed her internal medicine residency at the University of Virginia. She completed her preventive medicine residency at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she also trained in health services research as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar. Early in her career, she provided primary care in two Federally Qualified Health Centers.