Staff Bio
Alana Vivolo-Kantor, PhD, MPH
National Center for Injury Prevention and Control
CDC role
Alana Vivolo-Kantor, PhD, MPH, is the associate director for science (ADS) in the Division of Overdose Prevention (DOP) at the CDC Injury Center. As the ADS, she provides leadership, planning, and guidance to division management and staff on scientific policy, research methodology, and priorities for DOP overdose prevention research activities. She also oversees CDC's Cannabis Strategy and Coordination Unit.
Previously, she was a senior health scientist and team lead for the Overdose Morbidity Team in the Epidemiology and Surveillance Branch in DOP. In this role, she managed the nonfatal overdose surveillance data collected from health departments – the Drug Overdose Surveillance and Epidemiology system – funded by CDC's Overdose Data to Action cooperative agreement. She served in this role from November 2018 to November 2022 and has been at CDC since 2009.
Previous experience
Prior to coming to DOP, Dr. Vivolo-Kantor was a behavioral scientist in CDC's Division of Violence Prevention in the Research and Evaluation Branch, where she focused on measurement, surveillance, etiologic research, and program evaluation activities for youth violence, bullying, and teen dating violence. She participated in several large projects, including developing a case definition for bullying, providing technical assistance and oversight for the Youth Violence Prevention Centers and managing the data and analysis for Dating Matters®, a multi-site randomized controlled trial of a teen dating violence intervention.
Education
Dr. Vivolo-Kantor received her doctorate in public health from Georgia State University and her master’s degree from Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. She has more than 70 publications in peer-reviewed journals, MMWRs, book chapters, and government reports and has given more than 60 presentations.