Announcing Our 2025 PSU Commencement Keynote Speaker, Rachael Banks

Rachael Banks has been the Director of the Multnomah County Health Department since October, 2023. Before becoming Director, Rachael had extensive experience at the Health Department, giving her a deep understanding and appreciation of the Health Department’s responsibilities to the community as the largest local public health authority, local mental health authority and largest social safety net provider in the state. Some of the accomplishments of the Health Department during her tenure as Director include implementing the Deflection program and forging new partnerships with the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health.

After starting in Oregon’s behavioral health system, Rachael first joined the Health Department in 2002. She worked in various roles through the years and was appointed in December 2017 as the Public Health Director. As Public Health Director, she played a critical role in anticipating, standing up and leading an equitable public health response to COVID-19. Her leadership and values were essential to ensuring the County’s response was grounded, from the start, in equity and data, and centered communities most vulnerable to the virus. Throughout her time at the County, Rachael demonstrated a firm understanding of the functions of the Health Department’s core programs and strong insight into how they could connect more deeply to the communities they serve as evidenced by the implementation of numerous culturally specific strategies across a variety of communities.

Banks went on to serve as the State of Oregon’s first Black Public Health Director from 2020 to 2023. At the Oregon Health Authority, she worked with partners to implement some of the most critical stages of the State’s public health response during the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in Oregon being amongst the lowest quartile of COVID-19 deaths, 2020-2022, and achieving some of the highest rates of vaccinations for Communities of Color. In addition, her work to modernize Oregon’s public health system and implement a statewide health improvement plan will have long lasting and broad impacts.

Born and raised in Portland with deep community ties, Rachael graduated from Jefferson High School (Go Demos), earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Gonzaga University, and a master’s degree in public administration from Portland State University. She began her career as a culturally specific community health worker focused on preventing HIV, hepatitis C and sexually transmitted infections. She went on to become a health educator for the Healthy Birth Initiative, a program she later led, along with the Healthy Families and starting the Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health (REACH) program in Multnomah County. Rachael also led many of the County’s obesity prevention efforts, including the resolution for the Board of Health for the first time in Multnomah County which went on to pass tobacco retail licensing.