Jonathan D. White, Ph.D., LCSW-C, CPH
CAPT Jonathan White, PhD, LCSW-C, CPH (he/him), is an officer in the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, a clinical social worker, and an emergency manager specializing in the needs of children and vulnerable populations in crisis events.
He serves in the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR), US Department of Health and Human Services, where he is the director of the Office of Community Mitigation and Recovery, the office responsible for HHS’ disaster behavioral health, community resilience, and disaster recovery programs.* In that role, he also serves as national coordinator for the Health, Education, and Human Services Recovery Support Function, which is responsible for sectoral elements of long-term disaster recovery missions nationwide.
In 2018–2019, he led the mission to reunify children separated from their parents at the US border as the federal health coordinating official for the reunification mission, and served as the HHS operational lead for family reunification. In testimony before Congress, he was the first federal official to describe the harms of family separation to children and to advocate an end to separation for reasons other than the safety of the child. Prior to joining ASPR, he was the deputy director for children’s programs in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), where he led the Unaccompanied Children Program, which provides care and services to 40,000–60,000 children and youth annually who enter the US without parents or legal guardians. He previously served as senior adviser in ACF’s Immediate Office of the Assistant Secretary, responsible for crisis management, public health, and strategic initiatives. Prior to that he served as deputy director of ACF’s Office of Human Services Emergency Preparedness and Response. Earlier in his social work career, he was an oncology social worker with the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, and in prior careers he taught English to undergraduates and coordinated logistics for international labor union campaigns. He holds a Maryland LCSW-C, is a Maryland Board-approved supervisor, and is a NBPHE-Certified Public Health professional. He has deployed or held national-level leadership roles in over seventy domestic disaster, public health emergency, unaccompanied children influx, and programmatic crisis events.
* Position information for identification purposes only. Course content does not necessarily reflect positions of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
