2023 APIC/SHEA Presidents' Partnership

Pat Jackson is the 2023 President of the Association of Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology.  She is the Director of Infection Prevention at White Rock Medical Center in Dallas, TX.   She has been an infection preventionist for the past 29 years. She has worked in both adult and pediatric healthcare facilities but considers pediatrics to be her area of expertise.

She most recently served APIC in elected roles as Treasurer and member of the Board of Directors. Pat’s passion is mentoring new IPs.   She served as an original author on APICs Roadmap for the Novice Infection Preventionist and spent many years as a faculty member to APICs epidemiology training courses.  Pat believes we need to attract and retain the next generations of IPs in order to APIC to reach its potential.   

Pat spent the majority of her career in large academic teaching hospitals. In 2022 she transitioned to a small community hospital where she became a “one-er”.  She has enjoyed the small town feel of knowing everyone and has a new appreciation for the lone IP.  The lone IP by their very nature becomes a master of everything and often with less than IPs at larger facilities.  Pat earned her Bachelor of Science degree from Baylor University and has been certified in infection control since 1996. In 2016 she was a member of the inaugural class of APIC Fellows.

Deborah Yokoe, M.D., M.P.H. is a Professor of Clinical Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Medicine. She is the Medical Director for Hospital Epidemiology and Infection Prevention for the adult services and an attending physician on the Transplant Infectious Diseases consultation service.

She has served as the co-chair of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC) which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on infection prevention and control issues. She is also a member of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA) Board of Trustees and will serve as the SHEA Vice-President in 2021, President-Elect in 2022, and President in 2023.

Her research has focused on the development and evaluation of streamlined and reliable methods for performing surveillance for healthcare-associated infections, particularly surgical site infections (SSI), and she has been an investigator in the CDC’s Prevention Epicenters research program. In addition, she has participated in CDC- and NIH-funded research evaluating the application of a space-time permutation scan statistic to clinical microbiology data from hospitalized patients to identify meaningful clusters of infections.