CAREER SPOTLIGHT
Gregory Dill, PharmD ’99, MPH Rear Admiral, U.S. Public Health Service and Deputy Office Director, Innovation and Financial Management, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services BY JESSICA CANLAS
Dr. Greg Dill has found his calling. This wasn’t exactly something he’d anticipated on an ordinary evening while working behind the pharmacy counter at one of the now-defunct Dominick’s grocery store locations in 2008. Nor had he expected his subsequent path to lead him, not indirectly, to his current position as a deputy director for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency that provides healthcare coverage for more than 100 million people. However, like many such extraordinary adventures, Dill began his journey from a fairly ordinary starting point. And without any particular destination. In fact, when Dill, a native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, graduated from high school, he admits that he joined the armed forces because he didn’t know what career path he wanted to pursue. And college wasn’t in his budget. “You’d be amazed where poverty takes you,” he jokes. In Dill’s case, it took him to the U.S. Army, where he served as a medic “in an armor battalion, of all places,” he reminisces. This curious placement ended up becoming his entrée into the healthcare space. Afterward, Dill went onto earn his associate’s degree in engineering and a bachelor’s in business and economics from Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. Because of his prior enlistment, Dill graduated with a commitment to return to the Army and was assigned, yet again, to an armor battalion. This time, he was given an administrative post managing more than 30 healthcare professionals. And, although he never saw any overseas deployments, Dill took the opportunity to observe and experience a variety of disciplines in the domestic healthcare arena. “I realized I didn’t want to be a physician,” he recalls, “But I liked the science of drugs and the application of drugs, so pharmacy became attractive.” So, after he’d fulfilled his commitment to the Army, Dill, who’d met his wife by this time, relocated to Chicago. He earned his PharmD at UIC in 1999 and then went to work for Searle, which was later taken over by Upjohn, which, eventually, merged with Pfizer. It was 2003, and Dill found himself at a crossroads. “The day we were told that we were closing down, another pharmacist asked me what I was going to do,” Dill says. “I’d just lost my job. I told him I didn’t know what I was
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going to do.” His friend recommended, based on Dill’s prior military service, that he consider applying for the U.S. Public Health Service. Following that sage advice, he did and ended up with a posting at the Food and Drug Administration, one of eight operating divisions of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that is designated as part of the Public Health Service. As a commissioned corps officer, not only did Dill hold a full-time federal agency position; his military training proved critical while also serving part-time in the Public Health Service, which occasionally required him to don his uniform for short-term deployments to areas requiring emergency medical support. He recalls a memorable instance in rural Florida following a hurricane disaster. “We came in and worked so people could go home and be with their families,” he says. “It was hard, working that night shift. You’d get on about ten at night and then leave at eight in the morning when people were walking in the door and the sun was rising. I remember doing aminoglycoside for a newborn, and there was this protocol the hospital was following, but I was so nervous, I triple-checked that thing four or five times and even had the nurse look at it too.” It was during his time at the FDA, while reading a pharmacy industry publication, that Dill had a eureka moment. The same year he’d been laid off, the Bush administration
