Public Health Executive Director, Association of Public Health

>> My name is Scott Becker and I'm the Executive Director of the Association of Public Health Laboratories. We're an organization that's been in existence a little over 60 years. We represent governmental public health laboratories across the country and we do work globally as well. So we have about 800 members. We have 90 staff. We have a budget of about $36 million a year. Public health labs are really interesting institutions in state government. They're the laboratories that do all the testing for infectious diseases, for emerging infectious diseases like H1N1 in 2009 for example. That was all lab testing that was done in the public health system. They also are involved in all of the terrorism testing, so if there's these white powder events and things at courthouses and whatnot that group test them. And one of the most important things that public health labs do is they test 97 percent of America's newborns for heritable disorders and other conditions just through one tiny little heel prick that's taken at the hospital and it's one of the greatest prevention programs in the country. That's what I love about my job is that so much comes across my desk, anything from policy, government relations, member service issues, any infectious disease kinds of things, informatics, vial informatics, global health. Honestly on any given day I don't know exactly what is going to cross the desk and what is going to hit my screens so that's what makes it so exciting. I'm travelling to our member laboratories. We do a lot of work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and as I mentioned our global health program is pretty sensitive and I don't do too much of that although later today I'm actually heading off to South Africa for a meeting so it's a, you know I can say I probably travel about 30 percent of the time. My family might say a little bit more.