Alumna Mary O’Dowd commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Health.

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Alumna Mary O’Dowd oversees a budget of $1.9 billion and a staff of more than 1,200. She has promoted initiatives designed to reduce pre-term births, encourage breastfeeding, and get New Jerseyans to think about end-of-life care.

Photography: 
Benoit Cortet

When New Jersey health commissioner Mary (Marchetta) O’Dowd fielded questions from the state Senate’s judiciary committee at her 2011 confirmation hearing, her uniqueness was plain to see. O’Dowd DC’99 wasn’t just a young, female nominee for a powerful cabinet position. She was also seven months pregnant with her first child—not the ideal time to start a demanding dream job.

“It was not exactly my life plan, given everything else that was going on,” says O’Dowd, who is four years into a challenging tenure heading the state health department. “But it was a great opportunity, and I took it.”

O’Dowd’s years at Rutgers helped teach her how to seize opportunity. A biology major, she was among the first Douglass students to enroll in the Leadership Scholars Program of the Institute for Women’s Leadership, and the internships she held through that program—at the Eric B. Chandler Community Health Center and in the office of a state legislator who served on the Assembly health committee—introduced her to the concept of  public health.

“I realized that this was a way to really help people improve their health—but not have to be the doctor or the nurse treating a patient,” O’Dowd says. “The reach of public health is so broad that you can have an impact on an entire community.”

O’Dowd went on to jobs with the state Assembly’s Republican office, the New Jersey Hospital Association, and the emergency department of New York University Medical Center, earning a master’s in public health from Columbia University along the way.

She joined the New Jersey health department in 2008, moving into the top spot three years later. It’s a busy job even on ordinary days: the commissioner oversees a budget of $1.9 billion and a staff of more than 1,200. O’Dowd has pro­moted initiatives designed to reduce pre-term births, encourage breastfeeding, and get New Jerseyans thinking about end-of-life care.

But O’Dowd’s tenure as health commissioner has also had more than its share of out-of-the-ordinary crises: Hurricane Irene, which did $1 billion of damage to the state in 2011; Superstorm Sandy, which devastated shore communities in 2012; and the West African Ebola outbreak, leading to New Jersey's comprehensive response to the crisis as one of five states mandated to support a federal screening program.

O’Dowd credits the Institute for Women’s Leadership, on whose advisory board she serves, with teaching her how to develop a career strategy and “think about a collaborative approach to leadership, how to engage with people of different opinions, to really come up with a collective solution,” she says. “That has served me well in the various positions that I’ve had along the way.”

— Deborah Yaffe