Gregory Whitten

For over a decade, Gregory has served as a leader within federal healthcare and government organizations, including the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). He specializes in crisis management, international relations, biosecurity, pandemic response, drug development, defense acquisition, financial services and information technology.

About Gregory

For over a decade, Gregory has been at the intersection of national security, public policy and healthcare. He is a federal healthcare leader at Huron, where he helps government and healthcare organizations with crisis management and transformational strategies.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Gregory has worked diligently with clients to develop critical strategies and solutions to aid in virus suppression and vaccine dissemination efforts, such as:

• Creating Huron’s nationwide COVID-19 T3 strategy to help institutions test, track and treat the spread of the coronavirus.
• Serving as prime consultant for the city of New York as it mounts its COVID-19 response.
• Bringing biosurveillance and suppression to the forefront in the private market by developing a strategic partnership with the leading disease analytics company BlueDot.
• Developing a COVID-19 vaccine strategy wherein a centralized hub brings together the large medical supply chain, distribution and healthcare networks and national pharmacy chains to help states more easily and efficiently distribute vaccines.
• Advising leadership within the Biden Defense Working Group on issues pertaining to the role of national security in the U.S. COVID-19 response, biosecurity and the medical supply chain.
• Leading and developing transition memos for the Biden Defense Working Group.
• Authoring key communications for the Biden Defense Working Group, including that of the role of the Department of Defense in COVID-19 and biosecurity and the “Role of the Department of Defense in Build Back Better Policy” highlighting the utility of the Defense Production Act, the defense supply chain and rare earths.
• Prepping the Biden Defense Working Group for the presidential debate by developing talking points and positioning papers on the defense acquisition, supply chain and DOD, and the COVID-19 response.

Before joining Huron, Gregory worked with the nation’s top federal government organizations, including the U.S. Department of Defense, where he served as a political appointee in former President Barack Obama’s administration. While in the Obama administration, Gregory served many leadership roles pertaining to biosecurity, pandemic response, drug development and defense acquisition. Gregory began his career as the special assistant to the assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs, where he helped shape national security policy for biosecurity to include pandemic response and drug development. He then served several leadership roles related to strategic relations, international security and healthcare management systems. By the end of Obama’s final term, Gregory was serving in the administration as the director of strategy and plans for the billion-dollar Department of Defense electronic health record acquisition.

Gregory’s experience with federal agencies includes, but is not limited to, the Department of Health and Human Services (the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Food and Drug Administration, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Outside of federal government organizations, Gregory has also aided a publicly traded healthcare data and quality improvement company in setting up its federal healthcare practice. And he has served as a council member and an independent healthcare consultant to Fortune 500 companies across the pharmaceutical industry, health information technology (IT), and both federal and private sector entrants.

Gregory is the recipient of the Secretary of Defense Award for Innovation. He holds a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and a bachelor’s degree in political science from The University of Arizona.