Behind The Scenes

Behind The Scenes


Amy L. Warnock, Public Health Analyst

Public Health Analyst Amy Warnock currently splits her time between two teams in DNPAO’s Obesity Prevention and Control Branch. She sits on the Healthy Food Environment team, where she provides technical assistance to CDC-funded state and local practitioners working to embed healthy Food Service Guidelines into food service contracts, organizational policy, or purchasing agreements.

For the past 2 years, Warnock also worked on the Early Care and Education (ECE) team, leading the division’s state-level childcare licensing work. In this capacity, she manages a contract with the National Resource Center for Health and Safety in Child Care and Early Education to collect, assess, and rate how well a state’s ECE licensing requirements include nationally recommended obesity prevention standards.

Warnock enjoys identifying factors that contribute to the development of effective public health policy and how good data and science can inform it.

What is your greatest professional satisfaction?
My greatest professional satisfaction comes from the variety of roles I’ve held since coming to CDC in 2008. I enjoy the challenge of learning how large organizations function. Working at all levels has allowed me to understand public health from a variety of different perspectives.

I worked as a CDC Foundation Fellow and have served as the associate project director of a multi-year CDC study. And for 3 years, I collaborated with the Office of the Surgeon General and managed the work of the presidentially appointed National Prevention Council.

How do partners help you do your work?
We could not do our work as effectively or bring it to scale without partners. DNPAO’s Healthy Food Environment team works with partners to advance Food Service Guidelines in a variety of non-public health sectors (e.g., local governments, universities, private worksites). We rely on partners to help us understand how complex food systems operate and where the levers of influence exist.

What would you like partners to know?
The most effective partnerships I’ve seen at CDC have had a clearly defined vision of what success looks like. It is always a good idea to have partner roles clearly defined, leverage what each organization does well, and build from there. It can yield highly effective public health partnerships and make room for novel approaches for solving complex public health issues.

Favorite quote:
“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” — Winston Churchill