Catching up with Lauren Baker-Newton

Lauren Baker-Newton was a member of Cohort X. At that time, she was an Environmental Health Specialist V, serving as the Deputy Environmental Health Manager with the Coastal Health District at Chatham County Health Department in Savannah, GA.

Since then, Lauren has been promoted to the position of Environmental Health County Manager at Chatham County Health Department, which is the 5th largest county in the state of Georgia. Notably, Lauren is the first woman to hold this position, as well as the first woman of color in this position.

Additionally, she also serves as the Vice Chairman of the Environmental Health section of the Georgia Public Health Association. Lauren also continues to maintain her certification as a Registered Environmental Health Specialist through the Georgia Board of Registered Environmental Health Professionals, and maintains active memberships with the Georgia Public Health Association (GPHA), the Association of Food and Drug Officials of the Southern States (AFDOSS) and the National Environmental Health Association (NEHA). Lauren has also served the Savannah-Chatham County Public School System as a member of both the Business Technology Advisory Board for Sol C. Johnson High School and the Work-Based Learning Advisory Board for The School of Liberal Studies at Savannah High School.

In her current role as Environmental Health County Manager, she is responsible for managing the Environmental Health program, supervising the Environmental Health team which currently consists of 16 team members, and serving as a technical resource for her staff members and the community. Lauren also works as a Food Service District-Standard Trainer for the Coastal Health District. In this role, she has the responsibility of assessing the inspection techniques of Environmental Health Specialists within the district using Georgia’s Standardization Procedures.

The IFPTI Fellowship program has equipped me with the tools needed to appreciate the importance of food safety on a much larger scale, which ultimately helped me to cultivate a more encompassing vision of what I wanted my leadership path to resemble. I am actively working on turning that vision into my reality and I would be remiss if I did not mention that this vision was greatly influenced by the work done as part of the Fellowship program and by the time spent with my IFPTI Fellowship family!