Background
Christina Catlett, M.D., FACEP is an associate professor of emergency medicine at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. Catlett received her undergraduate degree and M.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Following her residency in emergency medicine at Johns Hopkins, she joined the Johns Hopkins Department of Emergency Medicine faculty full time in 1998, where she has specialized in disaster and wilderness medicine.
In 2001, Catlett became the associate director of the Johns Hopkins Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response (CEPAR), created in the wake of the terrorist attacks. At CEPAR, she has coordinated disaster planning and response within the Hopkins health system and integrated those activities with federal, state, and local plans. She has created detailed response strategies for terrorist attacks, hazmat events, contagious disease outbreaks, and mass casualty events requiring surge capacity. Catlett serves as the director of the Johns Hopkins Go Team (Hopkins’ deployable disaster medical team) and is a member of Maryland’s new Disaster Medical Assistance Team (MD-1 DMAT). Catlett has led disaster response teams to Hurricanes Ivan, Katrina and Rita, and most recently, to the Haiti earthquake. She has also led humanitarian missions to Central and South America and Southeast Asia through the Go Team’s cooperation with the US Navy.
Catlett’s interest in wilderness medicine evolved when she began climbing mountains in 2004, starting with Kilimanjaro in Africa. In 2005, she was the physician for an expedition cruise ship traveling from Japan to Siberia, the Arctic Circle and Alaska. In 2006, she was the Mt. Everest basecamp physician for the Adventure Consultants expedition. She provided helicopter search-and-rescue for the 2008 and 2009 UAE Desert Challenge, a five-day 2000 km automotive race through the deserts of the Middle East and medical support for the Abu Dhabi Formula 1 Grand Prix in 2009.
Catlett has spoken both nationally and internationally on a variety of disaster and wilderness medicine topics. She has led disaster conferences in Turkey, Colombia, Guatemala, Jamaica, Costa Rica and Indonesia. She has published articles in Prehospital and Disaster Medicine, JAMA, BMC Public Health, Prehospital Emergency Care, American Journal of Disaster Medicine, PLoS One, and the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.