Dr. Ginger Floerchinger-Franks was born in San Francisco, California and has lived in the western United States for most of her life.  She currently lives in Boise, Idaho.

Dr. Floerchinger-Franks spent much of her career working in different areas of public health – from bench microbiologist to managing a statewide injury prevention program.  After having worked as a virologist, and later supervisor of virology, specimen intake and processing for the Orange County, California public health laboratory, she moved to the Riverside County, California to work as the manager of the public health laboratory.  While there, she established a virology laboratory.  From there she returned to school in 1992 and earned a doctorate in public health at Loma Linda University in southern California.

Dr. Floerchinger-Franks moved to Idaho in 1996 to manage the state-level injury prevention program for the Idaho Department of Public Health.  There she worked with health districts throughout the state to promote child and adult motor vehicle injury prevention, bicycle safety for school children, sexual assault prevention, child sexual abuse prevention, and fall prevention for older adults.  She received the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/Association of State and Territorial Directors of Health Promotion and Public Health Educators award for Health Promotion Excellence for her work on these projects.  She also worked with communities and partners throughout the state to develop Idaho’s first statewide suicide prevention plan. She was honored with the Director’s Award of Excellence from the Idaho Department of Health for this work. 

Dr. Floerchinger-Franks spent the last nine years of her career working for the Idaho Hospital Association. There she worked to establish a statewide trauma registry in order to collect information on serious injuries needed for developing prevention programs at personal, environmental and policy levels.  She received an Excellence in Public Health Award from the Idaho Public Health Association for this work. She spent her final four years at the Idaho Hospital Association working with national and state programs to assist Idaho hospitals with quality improvement.

On retiring, Dr. Floerchinger-Franks returned to school taking writing classes in order to write the history of public health in Idaho from territorial-hood through the end of World War II.  She spent a year of the project reviewing death certificates and other information in order to trace the incidence and spread of Spanish influenza in Idaho.  She hopes to have the first draft of the book completed by December of 2020.