Puja Seth, PhD

Puja Seth, PhD, is the Branch Chief for the Epidemiology and Surveillance Branch in the Division of Overdose Prevention at CDC. In this role, she oversees the implementation of the surveillance components of CDC’s Overdose Data to Action (OD2A) program. These efforts include rapid non-fatal and fatal data on drug overdoses and innovative overdose surveillance projects, providing technical assistance to funded jurisdictions, ensuring data quality, and disseminating data rapidly. She has served in this role since February 2019 and has been at CDC since 2009.

Prior to her current role, Dr. Seth was the team lead for the overdose epidemiology and surveillance team in the Division and oversaw the Enhanced State Opioid Overdose Surveillance (ESOOS) program. She began her career at CDC in HIV prevention, where she worked both in the Division of Global HIV/AIDS and TB and the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention on international and domestic HIV research, evaluation, and programmatic efforts. She specifically focused on HIV testing and HIV service delivery to persons living with HIV, prevention, program evaluation, conducting multi-country randomized controlled trials, and providing technical assistance to states and countries.

Dr. Seth is a licensed psychologist and an adjunct faculty member in the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. She has her doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Georgia and her master’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She has over 75 publications in peer-reviewed journals, MMWRs, book chapters, and government reports and has given or contributed to over 100 presentations.