Alumni Spotlight: Lucila Zamboni, director of the Drug Overdose Surveillance and Epidemiology Unit

By Indiana Nash 

ALBANY, N.Y. (Dec. 8, 2025) — Early on in her career with Argentina’s Ministry of Health, Lucila Zamboni was deployed to two viral outbreaks, dengue fever and then H1N1 in 2009.  

“That exposed me to epidemiology and communicable disease and emergencies, and I was mind blown,” Zamboni said.  

Those experiences inspired her to study public administration and policy at Rockefeller College, where she received her PhD in 2017. Zamboni is currently the director of the Drug Overdose Surveillance and Epidemiology Unit in the Office of Drug User Health (ODUH) at the NYS Department of Health, which is exactly the kind of role she was aiming to have when she started out at Rockefeller.  

“It took almost 10 years, but I ended up getting there,” Zamboni said. “To get to this point where I'm building data systems, building surveillance where there wasn't surveillance before, has been very rewarding.” 

Born in Argentina, Zamboni studied political science at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. While earning her PhD at Rockefeller, she started working for the New York State Department of Health. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she led a large team of contract tracers. In her current role, she oversees the State Unintentional Drug Overdose Reporting System, a Centers for Disease Control-funded program. 

We recently caught up with her about her career and the biggest challenges she has faced. 

What was it about working during those two outbreaks that made you want to pursue public health as it relates to epidemiology? 

I think there were two things that that clicked for me. During the dengue outbreak, it was happening in the north of the country in a very vulnerable area, a low income, rural area. At that point, I was exposed to the disproportional impact that some of these emergencies have on more vulnerable populations. That's what informed my doctoral work. I was trying to focus on equity and public health emergency preparedness and how some of the decisions that are made by the government would ultimately impact how different populations get affected by either the outbreak or the natural disaster. 

For the H1N1 outbreak, everything was a little more complex and I was able to see the outbreak from a little bit of a different perspective because I wasn't fully deployed on the field, and I was working more on the governmental coordination of things. That was fascinating: the interest groups around it, the internal struggles or tensions of power between the different agencies. 

What does your role as director of the Drug Overdose Surveillance and Epidemiology Unit entail?

I oversee the State Unintentional Drug Overdose Reporting System. It’s an enhanced surveillance program funded by the CDC for which we do very detailed data collection on every single overdose death in the state. It has become the most robust surveillance system we have on overdose deaths.  

My unit also houses the drug checking programs, which is a very innovative harm reduction service that we have across the state where we are checking residuals of drugs. Participants come to one of the sites, and a trained technician tests their drugs, just residuals, on site, and we provide them information on the spot on what's in the drugs to try to minimize the risks of using the drug and maybe open the connection to other harm reduction services that the sites have.  

That has been super interesting because the program has very organically developed into a surveillance system of the street drug supply. We collaborate very closely with New York City, and we have almost a statewide surveillance program in collaboration with them. 

The other large project I'm overseeing is that we're trying to develop a spike detection method for drug overdoses to try to monitor more closely the state. I'm working with a research scientist that is doing all the modeling for that with the objective of trying to predict the spike and provide information for the emergency response of a potential spike and drug overdoses. 

How did you build trust in the communities you serve to be able to run the Community Drug Checking Program?  

The Health Department funds syringe exchange programs, and what we call Drug User Health Hubs, and these are local harm reduction organizations that provide person-centered care, where the organization provides anything they need to address their substance use. 

The hubs were originally established to address HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C, and they have become, with time, probably the frontline healthcare provider for people who use drugs, which are one of the most vulnerable marginalized populations we have receiving healthcare services. 

The hubs have been able to build that trust and that relationship with the participants. Since drug checking has been incorporated as one of the harm reduction services within the hub, trust has been built over time between the hub and the participants and it’s what has allowed us to establish those services there. 

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced in this role? 

I didn't know very much about drug overdose or harm reduction when I took this job. I had a long, steep learning curve in terms of the subject and I'm still learning. I've been here for three years, and I'm still learning every day about harm reduction and the work we do.  

In terms of the work we're doing with the surveillance of the street drug supply through the NYS drug checking programs, we're really building a rocket to the moon as we are taking off. Nobody has done this before. One of the things that we've been finding challenging is risk communication on changes in the street drug supply to the extent that we protect the participants that are part of the program from law enforcement actions, we don't alarm the public, and we still maintain that core public health prevention function that the health department needs to have.  

In 2024, the department issued an alert because we found a noble psychoactive substance in elicit opioid supply in Central New York and we put out an alert with the description of the substance, and we put out a picture of the package that the substance was sold in. We were thinking we're alerting people who use drugs that if they see this package, they should probably not use it because it doesn't have what they think it has. Immediately, the distribution switched to a different packaging, and we heard this from our drug checking participants. We learned from that experience, and we're trying to be a little bit more cognizant when we issue alerts.  

We also realized that if we issue an alert with a very widely disseminated press release, that's usually picked up by the media that makes a very disproportionate story about one street drug identification. In that sense, developing risk communication messaging has been technically challenging. 

What are some of the most rewarding parts about the job? 

One of the most rewarding things is as a director, to have the opportunity to hire talented people to work with me. I work with the most amazing and dedicated group of people. 

It took almost 10 years, but I ended up getting there. When they say you've got to have that grit of playing the long game and it's always a marathon, it’s not a sprint. So personally, to get to this point where I'm building data systems, building surveillance where there wasn't surveillance before, has been very rewarding.  

The fact that we, now from a technical perspective, we have been able to build this surveillance system of the street-drug supply is very rewarding because we had to update our data systems. We have to think through our data dissemination and the use of the data. So the fact that we can even do that and that's up and running is very rewarding. The State Unintentional Drug Overdose Reporting System program has become almost like the gold standard for data for drug overdose deaths. Its value has been discussed at the Opioid Settlement Fund Advisory Board meetings. Together with the rest of our NYS DOH drug overdose surveillance infrastructure, which is very robust, this particular program has become especially used.  

Thinking that we are making some difference is also rewarding. Every time I thought about leaving the health department, my first thought is, “Where will I be able to do this?” I feel you can only do public health within public health agencies. It's very hard to do public health from the outside and have a really meaningful impact.  

In that sense, it's been very rewarding, really trying to make a difference, and just the fact that we were able to support local partners with data that informed their decision making, it's a win. It’s really small wins. You don’t win a Nobel Prize. You just put out a data report that people can use to inform decision making or to develop public health interventions.