DR. SARAH MOYER NAMED MEDICAL DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC HEALTH
AND WELLNESS
ALSO SERVING AS INTERIM DIRECTOR
Dave Langdon
D
r. Sarah Moyer joined the Louisville Metro Department
of Public Health and Wellness as its medical director in
January. She also is serving as the department’s interim
director following the January departure of Dr. LaQuandra Nesbitt,
who left to become the director of the Washington D.C. Department
of Health.
Dr. Moyer continues to serve on the faculty of the University of
Louisville School of Medicine in the Department of Family and
Geriatric Medicine, where she is an assistant professor and the
director of quality improvement. She also works with Louisville’s
two Teenage Parent Program (TAPP) schools - schools designed
to give teen moms the support they need to be good parents and
to graduate from high school.
“I have the best of both worlds,” said Dr. Moyer. “I get to impact
the health of many more people by working on health policy issues
at Public Health and Wellness. Yet I still get the hands-on interaction
with patients, medical students, and residents at U of L about 30
percent of the time.”
Dr. Moyer brings an acute mind coupled with a passion for serving
others to her work here in Louisville. She grew up in Northbrook,
Illinois just outside of Chicago, and graduated cum laude from
Colorado College, a small liberal arts college in Colorado Springs.
It was there that her interest in public service took hold, and where
she started to become interested in medicine. “I was a physics major,” said Dr. Moyer. “As part of the physics program I shadowed a
medical physicist, but I soon realized that I liked what the physicians
were doing better.”
Before entering medical school, Dr. Moyer earned a Master’s in
Public Health with honors from Dartmouth. During her time there
she spent a month in Tanzania conducting research on whether it
was feasible for the medical school to manufacture its own HIV
medications for the people it was serving. Many of the medications
at that time were coming from China and India. “I’ve always been
interested in travel,” she said, “and in getting to know new cultures.”
Dr. Moyer’s other projects at Dartmouth included a critical assessment of ovarian cancer screening in high risk women, a feasibility
study for the Vermont legislature on implementing a patient-centered electronic health record system, a quality improvement study
for the Palliative Care Center of Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical
Center, and a grant proposal for preventing obesity in elementary
school children in Windsor, Vermont.
Dr. Moyer earned her medical degree from Temple University in
Philadelphia, where she formed Temple’s Emergency Action Corps
and worked in disaster areas throughout Central and South America,
after such first responder agencies as the Red Cross had left. She
served in Honduras, El Salvador and Bolivia in 2008, 2009 and 2010.
During her time at Temple, she also worked on issues surrounding childhood obesity in rural Oregon and spent time in Kayenta,
Arizona providing medical care on a Navajo Indian Reservation.
In 2010 she was honored for “Excellence in Family Medicine” by
the Philadelphia Academy of Family Physicians.
In 2012 Dr. Moyer did a resident rotation in Lilongwe, Malawi
with Partners for Hope. She worked as a