As a young man in the U.S. Army, Scott Lillibridge was assigned to the First Special Forces Group in Okinawa as a combat medic. During this time, the U.S. Army was looking for officer candidates to undertake training in Environmental Health and selected East Tennessee State University to provide this novel training. Sgt. Lillibridge was selected for this training at ETSU and with that assignment, a move to college life was set.
Graduating from ETSU in 1977, Dr. Lillibridge earned a B.S. in Environmental Health under his collegiate mentor, Dr. Monroe Morgan, and completed his prerequisites for medical school. In between his classes, he worked as a volunteer with the Johnson City Rescue Squad. Upon graduation, he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant as an Environmental Science Officer in the Medical Service Corps by Col. Burgin Dossett, Jr., M.D, the commander of the local reserve Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) unit.
Immediately upon graduation, Lt. Lillibridge matriculated to the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, School of Medicine, in Bethesda, Maryland, where he earned a Medical Doctorate in 1981. In 1984, he completed his residency at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, in Family Medicine. Dr. Lillibridge also accepted an epidemiology fellowship with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) program in 1992.
During his previous federal career with the CDC as part of the United States Public Health Service, Dr. Lillibridge served as Special Assistant to the Secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services in the area of Health and Security.
He was also the founding Director of the CDC Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program and served as the CDC Program Director for Emergency, Refugee and International Health. After leaving the CDC, he served as the Director of the Center for Global Health and Innovation for Texas A&M’s AgriLife Research. He also served as a tenured Professor within the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Texas A&M School of Public Health. His research was part of the national effort to develop and manufacture vaccines to address pandemic influenza and other public health threats.
Currently, he is the Senior Medical Advisor for the International Medical Corps, a United States-based, non-governmental organization with activities in more than 30 countries. He provides medical leadership to all the organizational aspects of medical and public health programs. In this capacity, he has responded to the recent Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and has just returned from the ongoing cholera outbreak in Mozambique.
Dr. Lillibridge has served on various advisory boards and committees, such as the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and the World Association for Disaster and Emergency Medicine. In 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush appointed him to the Emergency Services, Law Enforcement, and Public Health and Hospital Senior Advisory Committee. Dr. Lillibridge also has a plethora of publications and grants, and has given presentations at the White House, national medical meetings, the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and most major media outlets.