Trudy Henson is an adjunct professor at Maryland Carey Law, where she teaches Law and Policy of Emergency Public Health Response. She also teaches in the Master of Science in Law program.
Professor Henson has been a full-time law and policy analyst at the Center for Health and Homeland Security (CHHS) since 2008. She became CHHS’s public health program director in 2014, and since that time has worked to expand CHHS’s expertise on public health emergency (PHE) law and policy. Her PHE experience has included writing numerous legal handbooks and guides on PHE law in a variety of contexts, such as for state health agencies or transportation organizations. Her work typically focuses on the types of legal and policy responses and plans needed for PHEs, from man-made disasters, to emerging novel diseases such as Covid-19, to seasonal flu. She has written about state executive legal authority for public health response, including things such as those from Covid-19 response. She has also written on mass fatality planning and legal considerations, and helped develop one of the first alternate care site plans of its kind. Additionally, she has conducted numerous 50-state legal surveys for gap analyses of PHE law-related issues and drafted recommended legislation to address regulatory or statutory gaps.
She has a Bachelor of Arts from Berry College and a Master of Arts in English Literature from the University of Georgia. She earned her JD from Maryland Carey Law cum laude in 2008.