.jpg "Jennita Reefhuis, PhD photo")
Branch Chief
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Dr. Jennita Reefhuis is Branch Chief for the Birth Defects Monitoring and Research Branch in the Division of Birth Defects and Infant Disorders at the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, GA, USA.
Dr. Reefhuis has a PhD in epidemiology from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands where she worked at the EUROCAT Northern Netherlands birth defects registry. She joined the Birth Defects Branch at CDC in 2001 as an Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) Officer when she worked on anthrax in New Jersey and assessed the association between cochlear implants and meningitis. Since then, Jennita has worked extensively on the National Birth Defects Prevention Study, a case control study of more than 30 birth defects. She served as principal investigator for Georgia and as the lead epidemiologist for the entire study. Birth defects risk factors that are of great interest to her include fertility treatments, antidepressants, antibiotics and occupational and environmental exposures. She has published more than 100 papers, most of them on risk factors for birth defects.
She currently serves as Branch Chief and provides leadership to birth defects surveillance and research activities as well as work on stillbirths, neonatal abstinence syndrome and long-term outcomes of birth defects, specifically congenital heart defects, spina bifida and muscular dystrophies.
