Holly A. Wood is Senior Director of the Center for Community Health Empowerment and Learning (HEAL) and Health Empowerment Initiatives (HEI) at Purdue University, where she leads community-engaged public health initiatives that bridge academic research, practice, and policy. Her work focuses on strengthening implementation capacity, supporting interdisciplinary collaboration, and advancing applied, equity-informed approaches to population health. In this role, she partners with faculty, staff, students, and external stakeholders to design, manage, and evaluate complex public health initiatives that respond to community-identified needs and generate practice-relevant evidence.

Mrs. Wood brings nearly two decades of experience across local and state public health systems, with substantive expertise in emergency preparedness, trauma-informed systems, infant mortality prevention, and multi-sector coalition development. Her early career centered on public health preparedness and rural service access, including disaster and pandemic surge planning in collaboration with local health departments and emergency management partners. She later served at the Indiana Department of Health, where she led statewide programming, applied data-driven strategies to support high-risk communities, and collaborated with healthcare, governmental, and community partners to address persistent disparities in infant mortality.

Immediately prior to her current role, Holly managed statewide trauma-informed community initiatives, supporting cross-sector collaboration among healthcare, education, law enforcement, and social service systems. This work emphasized systems alignment, resilience-building, and translating evidence-based frameworks into practice. Across roles, her professional contributions have included federal grant management, program evaluation, stakeholder engagement, and the supervision of multidisciplinary teams.

Mrs. Wood is currently a PhD candidate in Public Health at Purdue University. Her doctoral work focuses on community-based crisis-response models, implementation processes, and the structural conditions that shape program effectiveness. Her scholarly interests reflect a practice-based research orientation, with particular attention to how public health systems operationalize evidence in real-world settings.

Contact Information

• (765) 496-9663
• hawood@purdue.edu