The Former Scholar: Mark Dornauer

The economic challenges of rural America get less attention than they should. Mark Dornauer hopes to fix that.

Mark grew up in rural Ohio, with a front-row seat to the industrial decline of the Midwest. “My hometown is part of the agrarian rust belt,” says Mark, where he and his neighbors felt the double whammy of modern challenges in agriculture and manufacturing. “The portrait of middle America painted by J.D. Vance, Tim Carney, and Robert Putnam— that was my life.”

After high school, Mark was recruited by Boston College as a track and field athlete. “I was captivated by BC’s Jesuit philosophy of ‘being men and women for others,’” he says. It was there that he met Sara, his future wife, during middle-distance workouts, “even though I didn’t know it at the time.”

Outside of the eight-lane oval, Mark earned degrees in history, theology, and biology. “These subjects may seem unrelated,” he explains, “but, to me, they collectively explained how, what, and why the world works. I like looking past artificial divisions.”

After graduation, Mark ventured to the University of Pennsylvania, where classes with Ezekiel Emanuel stimulated his his interest in health care policy. “I took classes on health care at the medical school, at the law school, and at Wharton,” he says, “and it drove home for me how health care touches so many aspects of our lives.”

While at Penn, Mark interned at the Bipartisan Policy Center, and gained a fellowship — and, later, a full-time job — in the Obama administration, at the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

At ASPR, Mark worked on the Strategic National Stockpile, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, and pandemic preparedness. “It seemed like obscure work at the time,” he says now. “Little did I know how important that training would become.”

For a brief time thereafter, Mark returned to Penn, and later Georgetown University, and performed academic research at Penn’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and the Geisinger Health System. Ultimately, he returned to his intellectual passions: health policy and rural affairs.

Mark and Sara live in Virginia.