Dr. Rohit Chitale
Senior Infectious Diseases Advisor, The Council on Strategic Risks
Dr. Rohit Chitale is a Senior Infectious Diseases Advisor for the Council on Strategic Risks (CSR). He is an infectious disease epidemiologist with over 20 years of experience helping national and international organizations establish and lead programs related to infectious disease prevention and eradication. He has specific expertise in the design and implementation of disease surveillance systems, outbreak response, and technology development of new disease control technologies.
Dr. Chitale recently served as a Program Manager in the Biological Technologies Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Prior, at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Rohit co-established the Global Disease Detection Operations Center, the first event-based all-hazards surveillance unit at the CDC. He also served as the CDC Country Director in the Republic of South Sudan, and increased the percentage of people on antiretroviral treatment (ART) among those living with HIV in South Sudan by 50% (thereby putting 30K people nationwide on ART)- working in one of the world’s most conflict-ridden, insecure, and inaccessible geographies.
At the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), Rohit established and led a novel division within the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center (AFHSC) – the Division of Integrated Biosurveillance – to meet capability gaps with respect to DoD biosurveillance and global health security. There, he led efforts to integrate syndromic, case-based, and event-based disease surveillance systems across civilian, military and veteran populations to decrease the time to disease detection, diagnosis, and treatment for individuals and populations worldwide. While at the DoD, he helped write the Global Health Security Agenda legislation. He also previously worked for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he co-created The MENTOR Initiative, a public-private partnership designed to test and evaluate (pre-clinical, Phase I, II, and III trials) new malaria and vector-borne disease control technologies for use in complex emergencies and other disaster-related settings.
Rohit has been integral to preventing, detecting, and responding to emerging infectious diseases globally via his varied expertise in planning, strategy, and policy; designing and implementing clinical research and international trials; conducting outbreak investigations; disease surveillance, monitoring and evaluation, and risk analyses; and health IT and communications. He has specific expertise in pediatric infectious diseases including malaria, HIV, and polio, supporting programs for 18 years in more than 25 countries in Africa and Asia.
Rohit has consulted for organizations including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, PATH, the World Health Organization (WHO), Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, Thomson Reuters, Inc., and RSM U.S. LLP. He has been a member of multiple U.S. and international working groups including most recently the Mars Sample Return (Planetary Protection) program for NASA.
Rohit is a Washington, D.C. area native. He is fluent in Marathi (India), conversant in French, and has basic proficiency in Spanish. He has a passion for teaching and mentoring and spends some of his personal time supporting a STEM focused family foundation in India. He earned a BA in Economics from the University of Maryland, a Master of Public Health (MPH) in Epidemiology from UCLA, and a PhD in Epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Rohit has held multiple faculty and research appointments, and is an alumni of the Harvard University National Preparedness Leadership Initiative (NPLI).