Deborah (Debbie) Dowell, MD, MPH is Chief Clinical Research for CDC's Division of Overdose Prevention. She previously led CDC’s Opioid Response Coordination Unit (ORCU), developing agency-wide strategy and coordinating efforts to prevent opioid overdose and other opioid-related harms.

Dr. Dowell has conducted research on quality and safety in medical care, on the effects of clinical guidelines, on the impact of opioid overdose on life expectancy in the United States, and on the effectiveness of interventions to prevent opioid overdose. She was the lead author of the 2022 CDC Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Pain and of the 2016 CDC Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain. She has served as advisor to New York City’s Health Commissioner, as the lead for CDC’s Prescription Drug Overdose Team, and as Chief Medical Officer for CDC’s Division of Unintentional Injury Prevention and for the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

Dr. Dowell completed residency and chief residency in Primary Care Internal Medicine at Bellevue Hospital Center and the NYU School of Medicine, where she later joined the faculty as a clinical assistant professor. She is Board Certified in Internal Medicine and served as an attending physician providing care and supervising residents at a community health center in New York City. She received her BA and MD from Columbia University and her MPH from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and she is a graduate of CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS).