Sonja Armbruster MA, Public Health Educator, Consultant, and Advocate

Pioneers in Health

Pioneers in Health Episode 15, January 9, 2025 – Sonja Armbruster MA, public health educator, consultant, and advocate.

Sonja Armbruster has an insatiable curiosity about how we can improve public health practice. She seeks new ways to learn, practice, think and do. Her interests include quality improvement, public health agency performance improvement, health policy, public health workforce development, community health assessment, health communication, and public health accreditation.

Her work focuses on providing training and technical assistance to state, local, tribal, and territorial health departments through her role as a performance improvement consultant for the Public Health Foundation. She also supports facilitation and training experiences for several health-related audiences. She continues to connect the worlds of academic public health and the practice community through her more than ten years of service to the Midwestern Public Health Training Center. Through her work with Wichita State University’s Center for Public Health Initiatives, she provides training and technical assistance to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment and local health departments across Kansas. Sonja has been teaching and facilitating meetings or training experiences for over 25 years. She taught graduate and undergraduate courses for Wichita State University’s Public Health Sciences Department for five years. Prior to joining the faculty, she was the founding director of the Center for Public Health Initiatives at Wichita State University’s Community Engagement Institute.

Her public health career includes ten years of service in various roles at the Sedgwick County Health Department, last serving as the Division Director for Community Health Planning and Performance Improvement. Sonja has been a Kansas Public Health Association member since 2001, served as president of KPHA in 2009, and has intermittently served on the board as an ex-officio member, Policy Committee Chair, Conference Committee Co-chair, and other support roles. From 2021-2022, she served as president of Oral Health Kansas’s board of directors. She currently serves as Program Associate for the Wichita State University Community Engagement Institute; Performance Management and Quality Improvement Consultant for the Public Health Foundation; and as a Public Health Consultant with Armbruster Consulting LLC.

Her formal education includes a Bachelor of Arts in Secondary Education and a Master of Arts in Communication, both from Wichita State University.