Behind every landmark in infection prevention, from antimicrobial stewardship guidelines to the COVID-19 town halls that reached flight attendants and teachers, is a generation of physician-scientists who led SHEA through crises, organizational change, and scientific breakthroughs. Infection Control Today traces 30 years of SHEA presidents and the lasting mark they left on the field.
When the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA) held its founding meeting in 1980 at an Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy session in Anaheim, California, more than 100 hospital epidemiologists signed up, dues were set at $15 a year, and the group deliberately voted against holding an annual conference.
Forty-plus years later, SHEA has a robust scientific journal, an international ambassador program, a foundation, a signature pandemic response platform, and a membership that spans the globe. The distance between that scrappy founding moment and the organization that exists today was covered, one presidential term at a time, by a succession of physician-scientists who each left the society measurably different from how they found it. The past 30 years, in particular, represent a period of near-total transformation in the science, structure, and scope of what SHEA stands for.
Building the Infrastructure: The 1990s
By the time the 1990s were underway, SHEA had survived its infancy, but the work of institution-building was far from finished. Robert Weinstein, MD, who served as president in 1997, articulated a governing philosophy that defined the decade: "My prime presidential directive was securing the financial footing of SHEA." Under his watch and in the years surrounding his tenure, the society built a reserve equivalent to 2 years of operating costs—a cushion that would prove critical as SHEA navigated management transitions and economic disruptions in the years ahead. Weinstein also led the development of 6 essential sets of CDC national and international infection control guidelines through the Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee, and pioneered landmark research on chlorhexidine bathing in intensive care unit patients to reduce multidrug-resistant organism cross-colonization and bloodstream infections.
Elias Abrutyn, MD, serving as president in 1998, drove one of the most consequential deals in SHEA's organizational history: the negotiation that brought the journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology (ICHE) under SHEA's ownership and control. Born from the journal Richard Wenzel had founded and edited with characteristic rigor, ICHE became SHEA's scientific flagship, and Abrutyn's work ensured that the flagship would stay in the society's hands. He also forged and deepened strategic partnerships with the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), CDC's Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, National Institutes of Health, and Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC), establishing the cross-organizational relationships that would sustain SHEA's influence for decades.
These organizational foundations were built against the backdrop of a deepening antimicrobial resistance crisis. Dale Gerding, MD, who served as SHEA president in 2000, was at the center of one of the field's most enduring contributions: coining and formalizing the term antimicrobial stewardship. In 1996, Gerding and John McGowan, MD, SHEA's founding president, first published the term; by 1997, it was incorporated into the SHEA/IDSA guidelines for the prevention of antimicrobial resistance in hospitals. Gerding also chaired a landmark 1998 summit under SHEA's auspices that called for a National Coalition on Antibiotic Resistance, presaging by years the federal stewardship infrastructure that now exists. "Little did we know at the time that this was the advent of antimicrobial stewardship as a burgeoning new health care infection prevention industry," he later wrote.
Science, Surveillance, and Sacrifice: The 2000s
The first decade of the new millennium brought a generation of presidents who advanced SHEA's science while navigating a mounting series of emergencies, including anthrax, severe acute respiratory syndrome, and Ebola in the background, and laid the groundwork for a fundamental shift in how the field understood health care–associated infections (HAIs).
Barry Farr, MD, who served as SHEA president in 2002 and died in 2017 from complications of multiple sclerosis, was one of the most influential health care epidemiologists of his generation. A champion of active surveillance cultures for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), Farr authored 167 peer-reviewed articles, directed the University of Virginia's hospital epidemiology program for 18 years, and mentored a generation of infection prevention and control investigators. His death forced early retirement at age 52, cutting short a career his colleague and mentee John Jernigan, MD, described as belonging to "a true Renaissance man." In his honor, SHEA established the Barry Farr Award, given annually to the most outstanding domestic clinical study published in ICHE.
Leonard Mermel, DO, ScM, who served as president in 2005, built his career around intravascular catheter-related infections, a decade-long effort to bring federal funding and scientific rigor to a problem that had been chronically underfunded. Mermel also created SHEA’s International Ambassadors Program and helped launch the SHEA Foundation, ensuring the society could support training and research beyond its membership dues base. His work extended to advising NASA on infection prevention during long-duration space missions. "I have strong ties with our hospital administration with long-standing friendship and mutual respect," he wrote. It became a model of the physician-administrator relationship, a hallmark of effective infection prevention programs.
Perhaps no single leadership transition did more to shape SHEA's culture than the appointment of Trish Perl, MD, MSc, as the organization's first woman president in 2006. Perl restructured SHEA's committee system, deliberately recruited diverse voices into leadership, and deepened the collaborative relationship with APIC. The partnership she forged, including joint retreats between the 2 societies' leadership teams during a year when she and her APIC counterpart Denise Murphy simultaneously held their respective presidencies, set a template for cross-society collaboration. The numbers underscore her impact: In the 16 presidential terms since 2006, 7 have been held by women.
Mark Rupp, MD, who served in 2009, guided SHEA through its first pandemic crucible of the modern era, leading the society's scientific response to H1N1 influenza. "There was very little politicization or grandstanding," he noted of SHEA's collaboration with the CDC and other agencies during that outbreak—a striking contrast to what would follow a decade later.
The Preventability Paradigm and the Road to IDWeek
No intellectual shift in health care epidemiology during this period was more consequential than the move away from treating HAIs as largely inevitable. John Jernigan, MD, MS, who served as SHEA president in 2013 after years as a CDC researcher in the Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion, articulated this transformation clearly: while CDC's landmark Study on the Efficacy of Nosocomial Infection Control project in the 1970s had concluded that only 32% of HAIs were preventable, a wave of evidence since the early 2000s had demonstrated that HAI rates could be driven dramatically lower. Jernigan helped establish the framing and the evidence base for HAIs as preventable adverse events, not background noise. He also guided SHEA through the Ebola crisis of 2014, representing the society in public debates about evidence-based transmission prevention and appropriate use of personal protective equipment during the US cluster.
Daniel Diekema, MD, who served as president in 2014, navigated one of the most structurally significant changes in SHEA's recent history: the merger of the SHEA Annual Scientific Meeting with those of IDSA, HIV Medicine Association, and Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society to form IDWeek. The decision was not without anxiety; many worried that the smaller, collegial SHEA meeting culture would be swallowed by the larger conference, but Diekema and his board managed the transition while overseeing a publisher change for ICHE and an abrupt executive director’s departure. Meanwhile, his research on contact precautions for MRSA and other multidrug-resistant organisms contributed to a more nuanced understanding of when contact precautions are warranted and when they may be safely modified.
Louise-Marie Dembry, MD, MS, MBA, who served in 2016, brought a business-school lens to SHEA's governance, strengthening relationships with IDSA and APIC and formalizing processes for producing expert guidance documents, a pragmatic evolution from the more resource-intensive formal guideline process. She also instituted joint annual webinars with APIC and established annual meetings between the 2 societies' executive directors, moves that embedded the collaboration into SHEA's operating rhythm rather than leaving it to individual presidential initiative.
The Pandemic Presidency
No SHEA president in the organization's history faced a year like David Henderson, MD, who assumed the presidency in 2020, the same week the first US COVID-19 case was confirmed. A founding SHEA member who attended the original organizational meetings in 1980, Henderson had planned a celebratory 40th anniversary year. Instead, within weeks of his first board meeting, every in-person meeting was canceled, and SHEA pivoted to a virtual model that would define the organization's public presence for the next 2 years.
Henderson's signature initiative, SHEA's COVID-19 Town Halls, became one of the most widely watched infection prevention resources during the pandemic. Held weekly throughout 2020, the Town Halls drew audiences well beyond the health care epidemiology community: airline flight attendants, teachers, and public service workers reported that SHEA's Town Halls were the only source of reliable, objective pandemic information they could find. By January 2022, the 66th Town Hall had been held.
"These Town Halls became a signature for SHEA during the pandemic and placed our society in a leadership role for communicating sound, practical advice," Henderson wrote. The format transformed SHEA from a society known primarily to specialists into a trusted public resource at a moment when such resources were desperately needed.
What 30 Years Built
Reading the accounts of SHEA presidents from 1993 to 2022, several through lines emerge that define the society's modern identity: the formalization of antimicrobial stewardship as a clinical discipline; the paradigm shift from HAIs as inevitable to preventable; an expansion of leadership diversity that has made the organization more representative of its membership; a series of pandemic responses, including H1N1, Ebola, and COVID-19, that tested and ultimately validated SHEA's scientific credibility; and a steady deepening of collaboration with APIC, IDSA, and the CDC that has amplified the society's reach.
The field these presidents helped build is immeasurably stronger for their work. HAI rates that once seemed fixed have been driven to historic lows. Antimicrobial stewardship programs are now a regulatory expectation in US hospitals. The health care epidemiologist's role—once an afterthought in many institutions—is recognized as essential to patient safety. For the infection preventionists, sterile processing professionals, and environmental services staff who do this work every day, the 30-year arc of SHEA presidential leadership is not just institutional history; it is the scientific and organizational foundation on which their practice stands.
