Lauren Pittenger

Lauren Pittenger comes to Abt with more than 20 years of experience working in or as a consultant to federal government agencies. She has strong grounding in research and research-based consulting to government clients. She also has extensive experience leading and growing business, managing technical and scientific projects, and coaching and supporting account teams. She has served as a director at Guidehouse, scientific program manager at Booz Allen Hamilton, and lab manager at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She has worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Canadian Public Health Laboratory Network, the Gates Foundation and the Association of Public Health Laboratories.

In her new role, Pittenger will focus on engagement with the broad spectrum of our human services clients, including the Departments of Labor, Agriculture, and Education; the Social Security Administration; and the Administration for Children and Families. She will be responsible for developing a strategic and operating plan for the human services portfolio to boost sales and revenue. Through her contacts with clients, she will translate their priorities into our strategy and execution plans. She also will help address client needs by including in our solutions, when appropriate, our capabilities in research, monitoring, and evaluation; technical assistance and implementation; digital and data services; and equity.

Pittenger comes to Abt from Guidehouse, where she led a team that developed training for laboratories doing COVID-19 work. The project also developed a strategic plan to strengthen the public health workforce by training underserved communities. She led another team that analyzed an organization in preparation for a reorganization effort. At Booz Allen, Pittenger worked on a range of projects for the FDA that involved bioinformatics, quality and safety systems, the inventory control and information management system, and Lean Six Sigma training. CDC work included quality systems implementation and working with state public health labs on pandemic preparedness and testing of vaccine preventable diseases. She served as the lab manager for the Agricultural Research Services, Bacterial Epidemiology and Antimicrobial Resistance research unit. In that role, Pittenger launched and managed the DNA sequencing center shared by several research units. She also collected, cleaned, and analyzed original data for publication in scientific journals and presented research at an international meeting.

Expertise:

• Strategic planning
• Process development, implementation, and improvement
• Workforce development 
• Training
• Data management 
• Technology solutions

Publications:

• Pittenger, L., J.G. Frye, V. McNerney, J. Reeves, J.Haro, P. J. Fedorka-Cray, M.A. Harrison and M.D. Englen. Analysis of Campylobacter jejuni Whole Genome DNA Microarrays: Significance of Prophage and Hypervariable Regions for Discriminating Isolates. Accepted: January 2012. Foodborne Pathogens and Disease. 
• Pittenger-Alley, L.G, M.D. Englen, C.T. Parker, J.G. Frye, B. Quiñones, S.T. Horn, I. Son, P. J. Fedorka-Cray and M.A. Harrison. Genotyping of Campylobacter jejuni from U.S. cattle and poultry by comparative genome indexing, pulsed-field gel electrophoresis and flaA gene sequencing.  2008.  Foodborne Pathogens and Disease.
• Isaac-Renton JL, Chang Y, Prystajecky N, Petric M, Mak A, Abbott B, Paris, B,  Decker, KC,  Pittenger, L.,  Guercio, S., Stott, J., and J.D. Miller. Use of Lean response to improve pandemic influenza surge in public health laboratories. Emerg Infect Dis. 2012 Jan
• Jesse TW, Englen MD, Pittenger-Alley LG, Fedorka-Cray PJ. Two distinct mutations in gyrA lead to ciprofloxacin and nalidixic acid resistance in Campylobacter coli and Campylobacter jejuni isolated from chickens and beef cattle. J Appl Microbiol. 2006 Apr;100(4):682-8.
• Jesse TW, Pittenger-Alley LG, Englen MD. Sequence analysis of two cryptic plasmids from an agricultural isolate of Campylobacter coli. Plasmid. 2006 Jan;55(1):64-9. Epub 2005 Aug 24.
• Miller WG, Englen MD, Kathariou S, Wesley IV, Wang G, Pittenger-Alley L, Siletz RM, Muraoka W, Fedorka-Cray PJ, Mandrell RE. Identification of host-associated alleles by multilocus sequence typing of Campylobacter coli strains from food animals. Microbiology. 2006 Jan;152 (Pt 1):245-55.