Lauren A. Smith, MD, MPH
Chief Health Equity and Strategy Officer
​CDC Foundation

​Lauren Smith, MD, MPH, is the chief health equity and strategy officer for the CDC Foundation and a member of the executive team. In this role, Smith brings more than 25 years working at the intersection of health care delivery and management, public policy and public health fields. As chief health equity and strategy officer, Smith partners with the CDC Foundation’s other senior leaders to develop and drive strategic efforts to embed health equity across the full range of the Foundation’s activities with an explicit focus on addressing systemic racism and other structural inequities and their impact on vulnerable populations’ health, wellbeing and resiliency. ​In addition, she leads activities to build organizational capacity to integrate health equity into the Foundation’s practice, process, action, innovation and organizational performance to elevate the importance of and deepen the Foundation’s health equity impact. Smith also serves as a principal advisor to the board of directors, the CEO and the executive team on the Foundation’s overall strategic opportunities, risks and tradeoffs related to health equity strategy and implementation. Smith joined the Foundation from FSG, one of the world’s leading social impact consulting firms, where she served as co-CEO and led the firm’s U.S. health practice and helped drive the vision and growth of the firm to advance its mission of achieving lasting and equitable social impact. In this role, she partnered with community, social sector, public sector, health care, public health and philanthropy leaders, including in place-based collaborations. Her previous leadership roles have included serving as the medical director and then interim commissioner for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, the senior strategic advisor for a national innovation and improvement network focused on reducing infant mortality, the national medical director of the Medical Legal Partnership for Children and the medical director of the pediatric inpatient service at Boston Medical Center, where she was on faculty in the Department of Pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine. Smith’s experience in federal and state government includes roles as a policy analyst in the Office of Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and as a W.T. Grant Health Policy Fellow in the office of the Massachusetts Speaker of the House. Smith currently serves on the board of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and Social Finance. She has published extensively in the peer-reviewed literature on health equity and the implication of social policies on child and family wellbeing. She has also served on numerous national and state advisory committees focused on public health and health care.