Victoria Anwuri, MPH

Victoria V. Anwuri, MPH joined the department in 2023 as the Commissioner of the City of St. Louis Department of Health. With the departure of the Director of Health in 2025, Ms. Anwuri now leads the department and continues supporting the department’s mission of improving public health, ensuring the success of ongoing public health initiatives while making improvements in overall efficiency, and leading the department through recent city-wide emergency response activities. 

Ms. Anwuri has extensive experience in public health and community health directing  programmatic, administrative and operations across complex systems. She is skilled in partnering with stakeholders from different disciplines across local and national sectors to achieve successful outcomes. Ms. Anwuri also has experience with grant writing and leading evaluation planning and metric tracking. She has managed large multidisciplinary projects funded through private and foundation funding as well as federal and state grants and contracts. 

Prior to joining the department she served  as associate director of the Institute for Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis, Commissioner Anwuri was responsible for advancing the institute’s strategic plan and programs and worked closely with the institute’s overarching leadership and the leaders of its centers and flagship initiatives. She oversaw all programmatic, administrative and operational activities. 

Before joining Washington University, Ms. Anwuri worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, as a public health fellow, where she conducted research on policy, environmental, and systems-level interventions that promote health.

Hailing originally from the Los Angeles area of southern California, Ms. Anwuri has been a long-time resident of St. Louis actively engaged in community initiatives to advance public health in the region. She holds a Master of Public Health degree from the Saint Louis University College for Public Health and Social Justice (formerly Saint Louis University School of Public Health), where she was inducted into Delta Omega, the Honorary Public Health Society. She also holds a bachelor’s degree from Spelman College, where she studied psychology.