Jonathan D. White, Ph.D., LCSW-C, CPH
Jonathan White (he/him), PhD, LCSW-C, is a clinical social worker, a retired US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps officer, and an emergency manager specializing in the needs of children and vulnerable populations in crisis events.
He served in the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR), US Department of Health and Human Services, where he was 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 served 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. His efforts in 2017–2018 to prevent family separation and in 2018–2019 to reunify children with their parents are featured in Errol Morris’s 2024 documentary film, Separated; Caitlin Dickerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2022 Atlantic article, “Family Separation: An American Tragedy”; Jacob Soboroff’s bestselling book, Separated; and books by Jean Guerrero, Julie Hirschfeld Davis, and Michael D. Shear.
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 provided care and services to 40,000–60,000 children and youth annually who entered 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 and is a Maryland Board-approved supervisor. He has deployed or held national-level leadership roles in over eighty domestic disasters, public health emergencies, and humanitarian crisis events.
* Position information for identification purposes only. Course content does not necessarily reflect positions of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
