2 finalists named to lead troubled Health Department
New commissioner faces investigations, lead woes
The city has narrowed its search for a new leader of the troubled Milwaukee Health Department to two candidates.
It’s now up to Mayor Tom Barrett to choose between them and send his nomination for city health commissioner to the Common Council for its consideration.
The two finalists for the commissioner job are Sanjib Bhattacharyya, the Health Department’s laboratory director, and Jeanette Kowalik, a former Health Department employee who now works for a Washington, D.C.-based public health nonprofit group.
The new commissioner will take over an agency that has been embroiled in turmoil for months.
Former health commissioner Bevan Baker was ousted in January amid reports that the department failed to provide services to the families of thousands of children who had tested positive for lead — or at least failed to track its work.
City, state and federal officials have been investigating the struggling department.
A scathing state report obtained by the Journal Sentinel last week found Milwaukee’s lead poisoning prevention program has failed to take even some of the most basic steps to protect the city’s children.
And a law firm has been hired by the city to investigate complaints of bullying and harassment at the agency.
Interim Health Commissioner Patricia McManus has been leading the department since February.
Bhattacharyya has been working for the Milwaukee Health Department since 2002, according to his LinkedIn profile. He served as the city’s chief molecular scientist and deputy laboratory director before taking over as laboratory director in February 2017.
In 2013, he received a national award — the Emerging Leadership Award from the Association of Public Health Laboratories — for his work in several areas, including same-day beach testing, respiratory and GI pathogen identification and next-generation sequencing to characterize multi-drug resistant TB.
Bhattacharyya previously worked as a senior research associate for the VA Medical Center and Medical College of Wisconsin, and before that was senior research fellow for the National Insti-
tute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases.
He has a doctorate in medical microbiology from the University of Calcutta in India.
Kowalik serves as the associate director of women’s and infant health for the Association of Maternal & Child Health Programs, a D.C.-based group focused on improving the health of women, children and families.
She got a master’s in public health from Northern Illinois University while working at the Milwaukee Health Department, according to her online biography. She received a doctorate in health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee while working for the Wauwatosa Health Department and Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee.
Kowalik previously served as UWMadison’s director of prevention and campus health Initiatives.