Meet Dr. Kathryn Anderson, the New Health Commissioner in Onondaga County

The physician arrived in Syracuse to work at Upstate four months before COVID-19 hit. The pandemic put her on a different professional path

By Stefan Yablonski

As the calendar flips to February, people start thinking about Valentine’s Day. However, physician Kathryn Anderson hopes people don’t forget about their healthy New Year’s resolutions.

Onondaga County’s new health commissioner is working hard to ensure residents have a healthy environment in which to live every day.

An assistant professor of medicine, microbiology and immunology at Upstate Medical University, she came to Upstate in 2019 after working at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Maryland and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. She was confirmed by the legislature in November 2022.

“I helped guide the Syracuse area’s response during the COVID-19 pandemic. I got into public health through my epidemiology,” the Minnesota native said.

She has been studying mosquito borne diseases for more than 20 years, she added

“I moved out here to Upstate in 2019 so I could be working more closely with folks that I have been collaborating with,” she said. “I came to Upstate to work with them, with my family — my husband and two little girls 3 and 6.”

She said she loves pets. But, due to her job, she doesn’t have any.

“I have no pets. Part of that we — at least pre-COVID — we traveled a lot internationally. Actually, we spent a lot of our time living in Thailand. So pets didn’t really go along with that lifestyle,” she said.

“When my family and I moved here, it was for that position at Upstate — but then COVID came about three months after we arrived, maybe four months. And I got pulled into the incident command response at Upstate, which was a new experience for me,” she said.

“This was my first time kind of living in the community where I was trying to respond to a public health threat. I found it really challenging, but really satisfying. I got to meet with all sorts of different people in the community who are all trying to come together and respond. I found it satisfying and it had me thinking more about doing something that was maybe a bit more broader impact, a bit closer to home. So, when this position [of commissioner of health in Onondaga County] became available, it felt right.”

It was kind of coming together, she got to know a lot of the folks here through the COVID response, “so it kind of naturally lead into itself,” she said.

The leadership style she is trying to emulate is “service leadership.”

“In this position, I think of myself as being at the service of two different groups in our community, working to serve our community and I am also here to serve the people that I work with in the health department — to make sure that they have opportunities to grow that they have the autonomy to get their jobs done. I am supporting them in every way I can,” she said.

What is public health?

“A couple things I think about that. One thing at the front of my brain since I started this position is public health does fundamentally important jobs. But they are jobs that if people don’t know you are doing it they won’t recognize that it’s a fundamentally important task until there is a problem.

Testing the water in Skaneateles Lake, making sure the restaurants are safe, kids are vaccinated,” she said. “So, public health is actually the absence of a problem.”

That can be hard for some people to appreciate, she noted.

“And so one thing, I think that has maybe contributed to, I’d say an under-appreciation of public health, sometimes, even the misunderstanding of public health — is public health is not speaking up enough about what we do and being visible enough, promoting enough — how public health touches almost every aspect of people’s lives from the time you wake up in the morning to the time you go to sleep at night,” she added. “I think people don’t really understand that. So it is easy to under-appreciate the role of science in pubic health.”

“The other thing that I think we saw in real time in COVID was the challenges of communicating to the public that some people may not fully appreciate the role of science in public health or how the scientific process works,” she said. “That was happening in real time in COVID. But we didn’t have time to wait for years until we did a lot of research and then say, ‘OK now we know how it spreads ... now we know all these things, now we can act.’ We had to act in real time; and based on the best information that we had. We learned new things as time went on. The information changed.

I think that was also hard for the public to proves and appreciate.

This isn’t misinformation — we’re not trying to mislead you. We’re just learning new things in real time. That’s why mask recommendations changed for example. It’s just

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