Assistant Secretary for Children and Families
NCDHHS
Charlene Wong serves as the Assistant Secretary for Children and Families at the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. She is a practicing primary care pediatrician, specializing in adolescent and young adult medicine.
She also serves as the Executive Director of North Carolina Integrated Care for Kids (NC InCK), an innovative model serving Medicaid-insured children in central North Carolina that aims to meet children’s health, social and educational needs.
Earlier in the COVID-19 pandemic, she served as the Chief Health Policy Officer for COVID-19 at NCDHHS.
Wong received her undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Morehead-Cain scholar and her MD degree at Emory University as a Robert Woodruff Memorial scholar. She completed her pediatrics residency at the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital. Prior to joining Duke, she was at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for adolescent medicine and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Fellowships.