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Alumna US Army MAJ Renee Howell Working with Local Populations in Djibouti
Renee Howell MPH '09
SPHIS alumna Renee Howell was an active duty US Army captain when she was selected to earn her Master of Public Health degree in 2007 at the SPHIS. After completing her degree, she moved to Fort Benning, GA to take the position of Chief of Preventative Medicine Division. There, she developed a comprehensive Pandemic Influenza plan that established a remote 100-bed inpatient flu hospital, a 16,400-bed flu facility and 300-patient logistics push packages of supplies and medications. Her comprehensive unit level educational programs resulted in the lowest influenza-like-illness attack rates in seventeen bases in Training and Doctrine Command.
In 2012, she moved to Fort Eustis, VA as the Deputy of Human Dimension Task Force (HDTF). The HDTF concept provides a framework for how the future Army must select, develop and sustain Soldiers and Army civilians. The concept redefines the parameters of human dimension as encompassing the cognitive, physical and social components and includes all aspects of organizational development and performance essential to raise, prepare and employ the Army in unified land operations. Because of her expertise in Public health, her efforts proved invaluable in codifying human dimension within the Army shaping senior level decisions for Soldier health and fitness programs at the senior leader level.
Renee is currently the Public Health Officer for the Civil Affairs team for the US Army in Djibouti, Africa. She provides public health assessments and public health education for the local population. With a focus on developing partnerships dedicated to regional solutions, she works to continue her unit’s relationship to ensure increased wellness and prevention activities are put into practice. She credits her ability to see public health from a different perspective as being a key factor that led to her current position.
Renee finds great satisfaction as a public health nurse taking care of a community. “Communities are so diverse, and assessing needs is the first step to [providing] the right type of health education to improve health and prevent disease. Through my education, both didactic and hands-on experience, I am able to evaluate a community and provide reliable and useful information about how to protect their health.”
When asked what advice she would give to students and other alumni with regard to finding work in the public sector or military public health, she said “Tenacity and creativity are the cornerstones of public health. It has been said that public health may not be on the “cutting edge” because we encourage self-change and change is slow moving… slow and steady will win the race in the long run.”
