Fairfax County Names Dr. Parham Jaberi Its Next Health Director, Succeeding a 23-Year Director on November 14

Fairfax County has its next health director. The Board of Supervisors has appointed Dr. Parham Jaberi as director of the Health Department, effective November 14. Jaberi currently serves as the department's deputy director for medical services, a post he has held since November 2022, and he succeeds Dr. Gloria Addo-Ayensu, who is retiring after 23 years as director.

Jaberi brings 20 years of executive leadership experience in local and state public health, including senior roles in Virginia and Louisiana. Before coming to Fairfax County, he served as chief deputy commissioner of the Virginia Department of Health from 2018 to 2022, helping oversee the state's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and he briefly served as Virginia's acting state health commissioner in April 2023. In Fairfax County, he has helped lead responses to communicable disease outbreaks and other public health emergencies and worked on expanding access to vaccinations, the county said. He is a board-certified preventive medicine physician, with a medical degree from the University of Maryland School of Medicine and a master's degree in public health from Tulane University.

The department he takes over is the largest local public health department in Virginia, with an annual budget of more than $70 million and more than 900 employees. It serves approximately 1.2 million residents in Fairfax County, the cities of Fairfax and Falls Church, and the towns of Herndon, Vienna and Clifton, providing disease prevention and control, environmental health inspections, public health clinics, school health services and emergency preparedness. Addo-Ayensu, who joined the department in 1999 and became director in 2003, led it through the COVID-19 pandemic and numerous disease outbreaks, and led the department in achieving and maintaining national accreditation, the county said.