HJNO Jan/Feb 2026

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF NEW ORLEANS I  JAN / FEB 2026 9 Dr. Jennifer Avegno is a New Orleans native who received an undergraduate degree from the University of Notre Dame, a master's degree in sociology from Tulane University, and a medical degree from Louisiana State University School of Medicine – New Orleans. She completed a residency at LSU/Charity Hospital Emergency Medicine and joined the faculty at both LSU and Tulane shortly after graduation. As an academic faculty member, Avegno worked in medical education and established the Division of Social Emergency Medicine at LSU to facilitate innovative programming, interdisciplinary partnerships, and improved population health outcomes. In 2018, she was appointed as the director of the health department for the City of New Orleans, where she leads the city’s public health responses to multiple epidemics and emergencies. At NOHD, Avegno manages a dedicated team of public health professionals in addressing critical health needs for the community, with intentional core focus on social drivers of health, equity, and access. Jennifer Avegno, MD Director, New Orleans Health Department Dianne Hartley, Editor Thank you, Dr. Avegno, for taking the time to meet with us today. For those who may not know you, what drew you into medicine — and specifically into public health? Jennifer Avegno, MD Well, my path is not a traditional one for public health, but I think that makes it a little bit more interesting. I’m a New Orleans native. I left for college. Really, med school was not on my radar, but I knew I loved science and I loved service and I loved tackling complex problems. And so after going to grad school in the social sciences, put all that together and decided to apply to medical school. While there, I fell in love with emergency medicine. It really fit my personality. I like to work really hard, I like to be busy, I like to have a variety of patients, and I really like to care for patients who have nowhere else to go in many cases, or who have com- plex issues. And emergency medicine keeps you guessing. It really is, I think, the closest way to interact with the community and to touch people in a very direct way. It keeps you humble. And it’s just a fantastic spe- cialty, even as challenging and as difficult as it might be. I did my residency at Charity Hospital and finished that six weeks before Katrina, which changed everybody’s lives in South Louisiana. For me, it vaulted me into an aca- demic career, which I had been planning for, but thought it was going to take me a little bit longer to do. And then it was all hands on deck after Katrina. I spent the first 12 years at LSU and Tulane in the emergency depart- ment at various iterations of what now is UMC educating residents, medical students. And really, through that service, came to an understanding that most of what our patients bring to us that are barriers to care have nothing to do with many of the things I learned inmed school about their anatomy or their physiology, but really it’s what we now call the social drivers of health. It’s the economic circumstances into which they were born, the neighborhood they live, the type of housing, their exposure to violence, the education they have or didn’t have. All of those show up in their darkest formwhen someone’s in distress in the emergency department. And so I started to work with commu- nity partners to try to figure out how do we go upstream? And how do we tackle some of these issues that are causing so many of our patients to present over and over again to the emergency department and for which we often don’t have great solu- tions? And that led me a little unexpect- edly . . . I never really had public health on ONE on ONE