Dr. Christopher P. Rennix ScD CIH
Dr. Rennix began his teaching career at Keene State College in the 2018 Fall semester. He was the Chair of the Safety and Occupational Health Applied Sciences Department from 2020-2024. He was promoted to associate professor in 2023 and awarded tenure in 2024.
Prior to his arrival at Keene, he was an Industrial Hygiene Officer in the U.S. Navy for 24 years and retired at the rank of Captain in 2006. In 2005, he established and led the EpiData Center, located at Navy and Marine Corps Public Health Center, responsible for all public health surveillance for Navy and Marine Corps beneficiaries and several Department of Defense programs. In 2009, he was awarded a $25 million grant over five years by the Navy to expand the capabilities of the EpiData Center to include the epidemiology and surveillance of communicable and reportable disease, antibiotic resistant organisms, behavioral and deployment health, and occupational and environmental health and the development of computer applications to collect public health data from the field. He was an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Old Dominion University and Eastern Virginia Medical School where he taught epidemiology and taught an occupational safety and health seminar at George Washington University.
The EpiData Center developed new and unique tools for the near real-time surveillance of reportable diseases and emerging antibiotic resistant organisms using a daily feed of Health Level 7 laboratory and ancillary medical data that is received from all Department of Defense medical treatment facilities around the world. In 2015, the grant was added to his permanent funding line. In 2018, he retired from federal civil service and accepted an assistant professor position at Keene State College in the Safety and Occupational Health Applied Sciences Department.
Dr. Rennix obtained his Doctor of Science from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell in 2000. His research interests are in assessing occupational exposure to various chemicals and the risk of breast cancer in women, cancer and disease clusters, the use of "Big Data" and artificial intelligence for public health surveillance, and injury epidemiology. He is a board certified industrial hygienist, a Fellow of the American Industrial Hygiene Association, and an active member of the American College of Epidemiology, the International Society of Environmental Epidemiology, and the International Commission on Occupational Health. In 2019, Dr. Rennix was awarded the Navy Superior Civilian Service Award for his support of the Navy and Department of Defense public health programs. This is the highest honor that a civilian can be awarded within the Department of the Navy.