Tista Ghosh

Tista Ghosh, MD, MPH is a physician epidemiologist with nearly 15 years of experience in public and population health at the local, state, federal, and international levels. Tista has training in preventive medicine and public health from Yale University, as well as training in applied epidemiology as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Tista has served as the principal medical epidemiologist for the largest local health department in Colorado, where she led the agency’s emergency, pandemic influenza–related effort to vaccinate 60,000 people in six weeks. She has served as head of the state of Colorado’s infectious disease and environmental epidemiology division, and has led public health responses to a variety of emerging public health issues. More recently she has served as the state’s Director of Public Health Programs and Deputy Chief Medical Officer (deputy state health officer). In this role, she provides scientific and administrative oversight over all public health programs, including all communicable and non-communicable disease prevention activities and policy interventions. She has served as an executive sponsor of the state's health equity-related efforts, and as Chair of the Population Health Workgroup of Colorado's State Innovation Model (SIM) Grant, which focuses on integrating behavioral and physical health. In addition, Tista has served in a consultative role to a variety of international organizations, including the World Health Organization and UNICEF.

Tista has a strong understanding and publication history in population health interventions in a variety of public health practice areas, ranging from infectious disease to chronic disease to substance use and behavioral health. Recently, she coordinated the nation’s first public health response to legalized recreational marijuana. These efforts led to a 2015 Vision Award from the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) for Colorado. In 2017, Tista was appointed by the CDC Director to serve on the U.S. Community Preventive Services Task Force, a national panel of public health and prevention experts that provides scientific review, evidence-based findings, and recommendations to guide population health efforts across the country.