Caterri Woodrum is the Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director of the Autoimmune Encephalitis Alliance, Inc. The Alliance is a medical non-profit in Durham, NC, supporting patient and physician collaboration to improve care, speed diagnosis and treatment, and enable research for this rare and serious condition in which the immune system attacks the brain, resulting in impaired brain function. In this role, she is responsible for setting the strategic direction for the Alliance with overall responsibility for all aspects of the organization, including programming, fundraising, operations, and advocacy. The Alliance has been serving its community since 2012. It operates with a renowned Medical Advisory Board of 19 neurologists, rheumatologists, immunologists, and psychiatrists. The Alliance supports a patient community of 4,000 diagnosed with autoimmune encephalitis annually in the US and operates nation-wide with regional patient support groups and clinicians across the United States.
Caterri had previously served as the Chief Executive Officer of the North Carolina Museum of Art Foundation, Inc. and the Chief Deputy Director and Chief Financial Officer for the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC. She was with the Museum for nearly 14 years. In that role, she was responsible for all aspects of the Museum’s operations, and financial performance for the 164-acre Museum campus including its earned income business units. She oversaw an organization with assets of $65M (inclusive of $40M in endowments and investments) and an annual operating budget of $25M.
Caterri is an accomplished executive with over twenty-five years of senior financial and managerial experience in business operations, process enhancement, non-profit governance, lobbying, fundraising, consulting, legal compliance, long-range planning, budgeting, financial reporting, public accounting, and auditing. Her expertise stems, in part, from a strong managerial background within the pharmaceutical industry. She held several positions of increasing responsibility during her 11-year tenure at GlaxoSmithKline. Caterri was recruited into the pharmaceutical industry from her career with Price Waterhouse. Caterri has also had her hand in entrepreneurship as the managing director/owner of an independent consulting and recruitment business.
Caterri is active in several professional organizations and currently serves on the Board of Directors of Voices Together, Hirsch Wellness Network, a NC non-profit organization providing therapeutic art programming to cancer survivors in the Triad, and US Modernist Houses, a national non-profit organization committed to education and preservation of modernist architecture. She also recently served as a Governor Appointee on the North Carolina Advisory Committee on Cancer Coordination & Control.
Caterri is devoted to health and wellness, recently extending her professional skills to include health coaching with a focus on integrative nutrition and lifestyle transformation through certification and training at Duke Integrative Medicine, Durham, NC, and the Institute of Integrative Nutrition, Manhattan, NY. She is board certified by the National Board for Health and Wellness Coaching, whose national exam is administrated by the Board of Medical Examiners.
Caterri lives in Orange County on several acres outside of Hillsborough, NC. She is an avid gardener and advocate for the protection of pollinators – monarch butterflies and bees – and has extensively landscaped her property, coined Butterfly Haven, with pollinator-friendly plants. Caterri enjoys the mentorship of young professionals and has worked with Elon University’s entrepreneurship program over the past several years as an annual lecturer. She is also passionate about art and supportive of the NC artist community, as evidenced in her personal art collection of works by NC artists.
