Staff Bio
Ren Salerno, PhD, is the director for the Office of Laboratory Systems and Response
Role at CDC
Dr. Salerno provides high-level oversight and coordination of critical laboratory science policies and operations, as well as management of laboratory safety and quality within CDC. He also serves as the interface between CDC and the clinical and public health laboratory and testing community for public health responses to disease outbreaks and harmful exposures.
Dr. Salerno works to strengthen the U.S. clinical and public health laboratory systems by continually improving quality and safety, informatics and data science, workforce competency, and response readiness.
Previous experience
Prior to these roles, Dr. Salerno served as the Director of CDC’s Division of Laboratory Systems for more than eight years. He also served as lead of CDC's Expansion of Screening and Diagnostics Task Force for the COVID-19 Response, co-lead of CDC's Laboratory and Testing Task Force for the COVID-19 Response, and senior advisor for laboratory and testing for CDC's Mpox response. He represents CDC on the HHS Testing Coordination Group, the Tri-Agency Task Force for Emergency Diagnostics, and the Federal Interagency Working Group on Improving Diagnostic Safety and Quality in Healthcare.
Before joining CDC in January 2016, Dr. Salerno had a 17-year career at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM, where he oversaw research in Sandia's biological laboratories and supported the U.S. government's global health security agenda as a technical adviser to hundreds of laboratories in over 50 countries. He was the lead author of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) laboratory biorisk management standard (ISO 35001, 2019) and the co-author of Laboratory Biorisk Management: Biosafety and Biosecurity (CRC Press, 2015) and Laboratory Biosecurity Handbook (CRC Press, 2007).