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CHAMPAIGN — The Champaign-Urbana Public Health District’s first-ever female leader is retiring after a nearly 20-year run.

“Julie Pryde, who kind of worked her way through the ranks at public health, has been a mainstay and stalwart,” said Danielle Chynoweth, chair of the health district’s board, who explained that a transition has been in the works for a couple years.

The board’s agenda for Wednesday includes a closed session, followed by a vote to appoint Deputy Administrator Dr. Mamadou Tounkara as Pryde’s successor.

“He has a background in research, clinical work, including doing surgery, administration, epidemiology,” Chynoweth said. “… We are very lucky to have someone of his caliber moving into the administrative job.”

She added that his potential start date is Feb. 2. Tounkara’s salary will be determined by the board.

According to health district officials, Pryde first came to the agency in 1989 as a social-work intern. She joined the staff in 1995 as a program consultant in the social-services division and project director for the Illinois Region 6 HIV Prevention Implementation Group.

In 2001, she became director of the division of HIV/STD/tuberculosis prevention and management, which was later expanded to become the division of infectious-disease prevention and management.

The health board appointed Pryde as acting administrator in May 2007, with the role becoming permanent in November 2008.

Chynoweth said that conversations about succession planning began during a strategic planning process three years ago, as the health district wanted to be proactive about planning ahead for when Pryde and other members of its leadership team would reach retirement age.

“We’ve been very planful about bringing new leadership in, promoting from within and hiring key pieces,” Chynoweth said. “One of the things that we did about a year ago is, we wanted to bring in a deputy administrator; the person who had been in the deputy position had left and taken a job with the university.”

The health district launched a competitive search for the role with the intention of eventually promoting the deputy administrator to the lead position.

Tounkara was chosen and joined the health district in June 2025. Originally from Mali, he has been a doctor in the United States for 12 years, Chynoweth said.

“He’s really hit the ground running,” she said. “He has been very instrumental in really looking at homelessness and housing as a public-health issue, which is something that is near and dear to my heart. And he was instrumental in helping (Cunningham Township) set up our joint shelter, which is based in the armory, the public winter emergency shelter.”

According to his resume, Tounkara’s education includes master’s degrees in social work and public health, as well as his medical degree.

Prior to joining the health district, he was the director of population health and data analytics for the Tooele County, Utah, Health Department.

His previous roles include:

Senior epidemiologist/lead epidemiologist for the Tooele County Health Department.Global surgery scholar-in-residence for the Center of Global Surgery at the University of Utah.Research fellow in the Department of Surgery at the University of Utah.COVID-19 epidemiologist for the Utah Department of Health and Human Services.

Tounkara has also served as an adjunct professor at Westminster University in Salt Lake City.

“His background in research and epidemiology is really important, because the role of public health is shifting,” Chynoweth said. “There’s less of a need in our community for direct services like vaccinations, which you can now get at the Walgreens. And there’s a lot more need for landscaping and education and supporting the entire field and all the municipalities and all the partners.”

She said she believes Tounkara has the expertise to bring the health district into a new role focused on prevention, anticipation and collaborating with other partners to solve public-health problems.

“One of the things I’m really excited about is as an MD, as a doctor, he — we’ve really needed to pull our hospital, our regional hospitals, closer to our public-health planning,” Chynoweth said. “And so I’m really looking forward to him being able to really play more of an outreach role in helping to bring the mental-health and physical-health providers to the table.”