Reina Turcios-Ruiz MD, FIDSA leads the Evaluation, Policy, Innovation and Communications Team at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s Workforce and Institute Development Branch (WIDB). She is a medical epidemiologist, internist and infectious diseases specialist. She is a graduate herself of the U.S. Field Epidemiology Training Program (FETP): the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS).  

Dr. Turcios-Ruiz attended medical school at the National Autonomous University of Honduras, completed her internal medicine residency at Mount Sinai Hospital in Cleveland, OH, and her infectious diseases fellowship at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, PA. 

She came to CDC as the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases’ Emerging Infectious Diseases Fellow in 2000 and became an EIS Officer in 2001. 

Her 20-year career at CDC has included diverse experiences. She set up rotavirus surveillance systems throughout the Americas in anticipation of second-generation rotavirus vaccines; supported population-based reproductive health surveys in the Americas, making tools for forecasting need of reproductive health supplies available for Spanish-speaking countries, and improving preparations for pregnant, post-partum and lactating women in the event of select biological threats domestically. She served in Guatemala initially as Resident Advisor for the Central America FETP supporting FETPs in eight countries across three tiers of training, and later as director of CDC’s Regional Office for Central America. Returning to Atlanta four years ago, she now supports FETP’s globally to assess their country's capacity to detect, respond to, and prevent public health threats, as well as the impact that field epidemiology training has had on their work.

Dr. Turcios-Ruiz has extensive international work experience on varied topics from outbreak investigations of severe diarrhea in young children and mysterious skin infections in Hispanic adults, to surveillance for rotavirus diarrhea, assessments in maternal and newborn health, and emerging infectious diseases. She has authored over several dozen publications on multiple topics like outbreaks of norovirus-associated necrotizing enterocolitis in a neonatal intensive care unit, estimations of the burden of disease due to rotavirus, smoking among adults of reproductive age in four Latin American countries, surveillance systems evaluations, and chronic kidney disease of non-traditional etiology.