Steering the Commonwealth Through Crisis— Keara McKenna Klinepeter ’11
This article was originally published in the Winter 2023-2024 issue of the Chatham Recorder Alumni Magazine and was written by Mick Stinelli. To view more digital Recorder stories, click here.
Keara McKenna Klinepeter ’11
After advising Pennsylvania’s secretary of health throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Klinepeter ascended to the agency’s top spot on the eve of the Omicron surge.
The message that everything was going to change came when Keara McKenna Klinepeter ’11 and her husband were about to close on a home in Harrisburg, the place where they planned to raise their future child. On the other end of the phone, colleagues from the Pennsylvania Department of Health were telling her that the president was declaring COVID-19 a national emergency.
Days later, she came back to that house–a 1920s home that was being actively torn apart as Klinepeter and her husband prepared to renovate –and she cried. While working as the senior advisor to the state’s health secretary, she realized construction projects would be temporarily halted in response to the crisis. Continuing demolition on their house could have put everyone at risk for COVID-19 infection.
“Those first couple weeks, when we were trying to juggle the house and realized, ‘Oh my god, there’s an actual pandemic happening’–that was wild,” she said in an interview in September. “That was a lot.”
From a 26th floor conference room in PPG Place, overlooking the red-tinged trees lining the edges of Point State Park, Klinepeter said that she wasn’t prepared to tackle the pandemic when it came to Pennsylvania in March of 2020. No one was. But she was able to draw on her wealth of knowledge and experience and take things “one hour at a time” until the hours added up and, nearly two years after COVID-19 first emerged, she was the one overseeing the Department of Health–just as the virus was about to deliver one of its greatest challenges yet.
A health scare charts a path
When she came to Chatham University to study economics and political science, Klinepeter was raring to go. She was president of her first-year class and volunteered for Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign.
That enthusiasm for politics and health policy was driven by personal experience; she was 11 years old when her dad had a stroke. He recovered, thanks in large part to the family’s proximity to a nearby hospital, but he had to retire from work. That meant he was frequently the one to pick Klinepeter up from school and take her to ballet. Conversations during those car rides made a big impact.
“I just remember trying to absorb so much from him,” she said. He was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, and he joined the Peace Corps instead of serving in the military. He suggested political theory for her to read, such as the writings of Enlightenment-era philosopher Immanuel Kant. He taught her about putting personal values into practice and using one’s gifts to make the world a better place.
“I think I very early was given the impression by him that the way to make a difference in the world was through public policy,” she said.
When it was time to choose a college, Klinepeter knew she wanted to be in Pittsburgh. Even though she was from central Pennsylvania, most of her family had grown up in or near here.
Dr. Marie Connolly, a now-retired professor of economics at Chatham, was one of the most influential teachers Klinepeter had. From her microeconomics class, Klinepeter began to see how data can be used to inform policy.
“It was the first time I could see how to quantitatively assess public health policy,” she said. “It wasn’t anymore just about my opinions or my beliefs, it was, ‘What did the data tell me?’”
“Just because I thought something, it didn’t mean it was right.” That was a big lesson for a young person to learn.
A political science class with Dr. Allyson Lowe, the former director of the Pennsylvania Center for Women & Politics, was important too. They spent a semester learning about Germany and its chancellor at the time, Angela Merkel. “I just remember sitting in that classroom, and it was one of the first times I really understood the importance of female leadership,” Klinepeter said. “It was neat to study a political figure who’s so talented, and then, being taught about that figure by someone who’s also so talented.”
During her third year, Klinepeter was admitted to Carnegie Mellon University’s graduate school through Chatham’s accelerated master’s program, part of a partnership with CMU’s H. John Heinz III College. The arrangement allowed her to finish her undergraduate education at Chatham while also taking graduate classes at Carnegie Mellon. “I kind of knew in high school that I really wanted to go into policy,” she said of the program. “Knowing that I could do it faster and for less money seemed like a good idea.”
Before returning to Carnegie Mellon, where she obtained a master’s degree in health care policy and management, she took a year off school to serve as a Coro Fellow.
“It was probably the most influential thing I ever did,” she said. The Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs was started in the wake of World War II to train effective and ethical leaders in different sectors. One of its five training centers is in Pittsburgh, and Klinepeter was one of a dozen fellows the center accepted that year. Throughout the program, she cycled through different placements centered around that year’s theme of women’s leadership.
Keara McKenna Klinepeter ’11
“I got to see a lot of different styles,” Klinepeter says. “Some of them I liked, and some of them, I have not repeated the behaviors. But it gave me a better set of work experience to draw on in my last year of graduate school, and it taught me so much that I use every day with respect to how to be a strong leader, how to think critically, how to manage a team effectively.”
While finishing her graduate education, Klinepeter was recruited by the Mitre Corporation, a not-for-profit organization that supports government agencies that oversee healthcare, defense, cybersecurity, and other national interests. She stayed on with Mitre after graduating and helped with their expansion into the international market before working on national security matters. For a 24-year-old, the experience was invaluable, but eventually, she wanted to be closer to her family in Harrisburg.
The commonwealth calls
After moving back to Harrisburg, Klinepeter was able to arrange a meeting with the director of policy at the Pennsylvania Department of Health. The official told her about a new project, the Rural Health Model, which seemed to need some smart people to work on it.
With the Rural Health Model, she traveled to hospitals in rural regions all over the state to work directly with their boards and find new payment models that could help lower costs paid by Medicare. To date, none of the hospitals in the program, which is ongoing, have closed.
Dr. Rachel Levine, the state secretary of health at the time, saw the work Klinepeter was doing and asked her to do similar work on a statewide scale. But just weeks after she took a job as senior advisor to Dr. Levine, the state began to ramp up its response to rising COVID-19 infections. Klinepeter’s role shifted to overseeing the state’s response to COVID-19 in long-term care facilities.
Klinepeter became executive deputy secretary, the department’s second highest position, when Dr. Levine left the department to work in President Joe Biden’s administration. At this point, Klinepeter and her colleagues were coordinating the statewide rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine. When Secretary of Health Alison Beam stepped down, Governor Tom Wolf tapped Klinepeter to take the department’s top spot, just as the Omicron variant of the virus began to present a new set of challenges in December 2021.
“I said, I will get you through Omicron, I will get you through budget hearings, there’s some cool policy guidance I have to drop, and then I have to go,” Klinepeter recalled. “I was 12 weeks pregnant, and not many people in the governor’s office knew that yet, so that was a surprise.”
Despite how politically contentious discussions around masking and vaccines became, Klinepeter said being at the Department of Health left her feeling hopeful about the future of public health. “Even though there were people who had a difference of opinions, I personally found ways to work effectively with them, particularly legislators who were on the other side of the aisle,” she said.
Klinepeter resigned from the post in April 2022. She took time off from work to finish her pregnancy and raise her child. She started working at Deloitte, the multinational professional services company, as a senior manager this past summer.
She said it was a combination of three vital learning experiences–her studies at Chatham, where she saw women’s leadership and gained self-confidence; her time as a Coro Fellow, where she managed stressful work experiences; and working in national security with Mitre, where she navigated projects with high stakes – that fortified her to take on the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was a humbling experience, to say the least,” she said. “I think it only got more humbling further into it. I think, for me personally— I took on progressively more responsibility, and in the end, I had the duty to do what the data told me, what the science told me, what I thought was going to be best for 13 million Pennsylvanians.”