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Introduction: Universities were challenged during the COVID-19 pandemic to continue providing quality education for their students while navigating the uncertainties of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Objectives: The goal of this article is to describe strategies used by Colorado State University (CSU) to mitigate SARS-CoV-2 transmission among faculty, staff, and students and to describe procedures used in microbiology teaching laboratories. Methods: Information concerning CSU's pandemic response was gathered via email communications to the CSU community, town hall meetings, and interviews with leaders, researchers, and staff who spearheaded public health initiatives. Results: To date, there have been no known cases of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in the classroom. Early strategies that contributed to this success included social norming of safe public health behaviors, development of low-cost, rapid screening and surveillance methods, an online COVID-19 reporting system, contact tracing and quarantine, rearranging classrooms to reduce the capacity by 50%, increasing air flow, enhanced cleaning and production of sanitizer, and flexible instructors who quickly changed their courses for remote delivery or launched extra risk management procedures for face-to-face delivery of laboratory, performance, or studio classes. Conclusion: Intense collaboration among the CSU community, open and frequent communication, coordination of efforts, flexible instructors, and the willingness to follow safe public health behaviors allowed CSU to continue face-to-face teaching in courses that required hands-on learning or demanded in-person instruction. It is the hope of the authors that this information can provide both a historical account and useful information for others dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Thirty percent of federal public health employees were retirement eligible in September 2017. Further, at the state public health level, as indicated in the recent Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Survey (PH WINS), an estimated 25% of employees are planning to retire before 2020 with an additional 18% intending to leave their organizations within one year. Due to these workforce changes, there is an urgent need for public health organizations to examine how they are ensuring a talent pool from which leaders can emerge. As a large federal public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) faces the challenge of providing leadership development to staff. Factors were examined that agency leaders identified as key components of a leadership development program to transition scientific public health staff into supervisory leadership roles. While many factors contribute to leadership development, participants more often identified training, provision of opportunities, mentors, and identification of high potential employees as key components of a leadership develop program. With the need to develop organizational leaders to be ready when vacancies become available, findings from this study can inform the development and implementation of public health leadership development programs.