President & CEO
Medical Planning Resources, Inc.
(Former Senior Medical Planner, Office of the Secretary of Defense)

Pietro (Peter) Marghella is President & CEO of Medical Planning Resources, Inc. (MPR, Inc.), a private firm which specializes in medical and public health contingency planning and management solutions. He is a retired Naval Officer and has served variously as the Director of Medical Contingency Operations for the Office of the Secretary of Defense; Chief of Medical Plans and Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Chief of Medical Plans and Intelligence for the U.S. Pacific Command. He holds graduate degrees from Central Michigan University and The Naval War College, and is a Doctoral Candidate in Complex Emergency and Disaster Management at Tulane University’s School of Public Health. He is a member of the inaugural class of the National Preparedness Leadership Program at The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and an Adjunct Research Scholar at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. Peter holds academic appointments at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS); Tulane University; and the George C. Marshall Center for European Security Studies.

His planning credentials include authoring the CDC’s initial draft of the Pandemic Influenza Response Plan; the Nation’s first Catastrophic Incident Response Plan; and the National Smallpox Response Plan. He is Certified Emergency Manager (CEM®) in the International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM); the Co-founder and First President of the American College of Contingency Planners (ACCP); and a well-published author and a frequent speaker at national- and international-level conferences addressing medical preparedness for catastrophic emergencies and disasters.