Chad Heilig, PhD

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Chad Heilig, PhD, believes that everyone who wants to do good things with data should have the intellectual support to do so. Throughout his 25 years as a civil servant at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr Heilig mentored, coached, and advised early-career professionals in working with data and analytic methods. Dozens of learners spanned a variety of backgrounds through several different CDC programs, as well as doctoral, masters, undergraduate, and high school level students. His career inspired him to write an essay on a culture for doing good things with data in public health. 

At CDC Dr Heilig applied his doctoral degree in statistics and extended his contributions into philosophy, research ethics, data science, and mentoring. He worked initially on studies involving women with or at risk of HIV, spent 3 years overseeing CDC’s human research protections program, and returned to the methodology and ethics of clinical trials in tuberculosis. He branched out to support or lead novel methods to improve finding cases of tuberculosis among persons living with HIV and to advance use of laboratory diagnostics among children living with HIV. As CDC’s first associate director for data science, he worked to assure scientific quality and analytic rigor in the application of machine learning to public health and championed the use of analytic methods in CDC’s experiential learning programs. 

Dr Heilig has previously co-taught a graduate/undergraduate seminar on ethics and epistemology in clinical trials, taught introductory biostatistics to Masters of Public Health students, and delivered dozens of guest lectures and seminars at CDC, colleges, and universities. In Spring 2026, Dr Heilig served as an adjunct professor in Meharry Medical College’s School of Global Health, where he taught Biostatistics and Health Equity.