Position: Executive-in-Residence
Location: Durham, North Carolina
Organization: Common Health Coalition
Charlene Wong, MD MSHP is a physician and health policy leader who served as the Senior Advisor for Health Strategy to the CDC Director, where she led the agency’s collaborative approach to protecting health through partnerships with health care and across government to advance priorities in supporting young families, mental health and overdose, and readiness and response.
Previously, she was the inaugural Assistant Secretary for Children and Families and the Chief Health Policy Officer for COVID-19 in the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.
Dr. Wong is on faculty at Duke University and launched the North Carolina Integrated Care for Kids (NC InCK) as Executive Director in 2020, an innovative model serving ~100,000 Medicaid-insured children in central North Carolina by integrating services across health care, educational, and social sectors (e.g., schools, housing, food, early care and education, child welfare). She is a primary care pediatrician, specializing in adolescent and young adult medicine.
Dr. Wong’s research and policy training includes fellowships at the CDC and in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program. She received her undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Morehead-Cain scholar and completed her medical and research training at Emory University, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, University of Washington, Seattle Children’s Hospital, University of Pennsylvania, and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. She enjoys spending time outdoors with her husband and two daughters.
