LTC (RET) Joanne E. McGovern

Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Joanne E. McGovern is a highly decorated combat veteran and a Medical and Public Health Plans, Operations, and Intelligence executive with over forty years of disaster, humanitarian, and complex emergency experiences in both domestic and international settings.

For 34-years, Joanne served as a member of the United States Army, where she participated in combat missions, peacekeeping operations, disasters, and humanitarian responses around the globe in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Central and South America, the Caribbean, as well as here at home.

Since her retirement from the Army, she served as a senior advisor at the Yale New Haven Health System Center for Emergency Preparedness and Disaster Response (YNHHS-CEPDR) whose mission is to reduce loss of life, injury, and illness by developing and delivering services across the nation and around the globe. She also served as a Program Director for the Department of Emergency Medicine, Yale University School of Medicine, on programs that addressed the needs of the elderly, and another that looked at the challenges surrounding opioid abuse. During the COVID pandemic, she served as the Program Director for Yale’s Contact Tracing and Outreach Program.

Currently LTC (R) McGovern reports to Yale’s senior leadership on health threats that could impact the University and its community. She lectures on Medical and Public Health Disasters and Humanitarian Planning and Operations, Crisis Communications, and the impacts of climate change on natural disasters, at the graduate level, for both the Yale School of Public Health and the Defense Medical Readiness Training Institute. She has written extensively on the importance of emergency medical planning, mass casualty evacuation, decision making in a crisis, prehospital triage for mass casualties, mass fatality management and has been published in several journals and textbooks.