Anne Zink, MD

Dr. Anne Zink is an Emergency Medicine physician in Palmer, Alaska, a Senior Fellow at the Yale School of Public Health, and co-founder of PopHIVE.org—a nimble platform built at Yale that integrates de-identified health data to strengthen trust, improve situational awareness, and make actionable insights available to the people who need them most. At Yale, she serves on national committees focused on rebuilding trust in public health and is deeply engaged as an educator and mentor, helping develop the next generation of leaders prepared to navigate real-world complexity. 

Dr. Zink previously served as Alaska’s Chief Medical Officer from 2018–2024, leading the state through the COVID-19 pandemic and driving reforms to make government work better for people. Her work included restructuring the health department, strengthening mental- and behavioral-health systems, advancing chronic-disease initiatives, and—most importantly—regularly listening to communities and creating space for honest, robust dialogue. 

A practicing emergency physician, she often says that “the emergency department is where all good public policy comes to fail.” To care for her patients, she realized she also had to care for the policies shaping their lives—patients are her why; policy is her how. This human-centered approach underpins her work to braid healthcare and public health, shift systems toward prevention, and create data and decision-making structures that truly serve people. 

Nationally, Dr. Zink advises the Vaccine Integrity Project, The Gov Act, the Brown STAT Network, and the Echo Network, and she serves on the Board of Directors for Science to People. She previously served as a senior advisor to The Pew Charitable Trusts. She trained at Bryn Mawr College (BA) and Stanford University (MD) and Residency in Utah.  She is originally from Denver Colorado, a former NOLS instructor and Watson Fellow.