Dr. Benova didn’t start off as an infectious disease specialist - Infectious disease research came to her through her work on maternal health during the COVID-19 epidemic. She shares with us her insights into maternal and neonatal health, and shows us how key populations - expectant mothers - are forgotten in disease outbreaks. Dr. Benova explains how using mixed methods and qualitative evidence can help us with the early detection of health emergencies.

Dr. Benova conducts research reproductive and maternal health, and health seeking behaviors at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp. She has an eclectic background, with expertise as a quantitative population health scientist who draws upon management, economics, Middle East studies, demography, and epidemiology.  From 2014 to 2018, she served as a co-investigator on the Maternal healthcare markets Evaluation Team (MET) at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, where she led the SAGE (Secondary data Analysis for Generating new Evidence) team.

Jackie Thornhill is a communications, policy, and public relations expert currently serving as a Legislative Aide to San Francisco District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman. She has created and executed communications plans for multiple elected officials, candidates for elected office, and public agencies. She has coordinated digital engagement and social media campaigns in her roles with City government, including campaigns to educate the public about the City’s evolving public health guidelines throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Campaigns she created include “Show Your Pride, Get Vaccinated!”, “Dispatcher Week 2021”, “A Place for All”, and Supervisor Mandelman’s calls for an escalated public health response to the MPX outbreak in 2022. Jackie grew up in the San Fernando Valley before moving to San Francisco in 2016, and graduated from the University of San Francisco with a bachelor's degree in Political Science in 2019. She has worked for the City and County of San Francisco since January, 2020.

Links:
twitter: https://twitter.com/SF_emergency/status/1403414661337288705
show your pride campaign: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9N-fE6FmJXBwheBpzKjmmzy1T1i49KEP
SF monkeypox response: https://www.ebar.com/story.php?ch=news&sc=latest_news&id=317259

Quote: “No one institution can possibly do it on their own”

Dr Gail Carson is an adult infectious diseases doctor by background who joined the first GOARN (network of institutions preparing and responding to outbreaks) mission to Gulu in 2000. Since then her career has been focussed on outbreak preparedness and response. She was fortunate enough to serve on other missions including time spent at WHO Geneva. While seconded to WHO Geneva for SARS in 2003 she set up the SARS clinical network and saw the value of immediate communication across countries to assist with the rapid sharing of knowledge to advance patient care and policy.  Her first consultant post after training was with the public health agency of England, with their special pathogens branch. From there she moved to the University of Oxford to help set up an international clinical research consortium/network called ISARIC. In 2014, she was part of the Secretariat that supported the new research funders consortium GloPID R. In 2016 she was delighted to be selected to sit on the GOARN steering committee, subsequently set up GOARN Research, became deputy chair in 2018 and Chair of the Steering committee in 2022. Throughout her career she has witnessed first-hand the benefits of collaborative working and hopes that this continues as such an approach will always be needed.

Links: 

Quote:

Syra Madad is an American pathogen preparedness expert and infectious disease epidemiologist. Madad is the Senior Director of the System-wide Special Pathogens Program at NYC Health + Hospitals where she is part of the executive leadership team which oversees New York City's response to the Coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in the city's 11 public hospitals. She was previously featured in the Netflix documentary series Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak and the Discovery Channel documentary The Vaccine: Conquering COVID.

Links:
“The Hot Zone” by Richard Preston: https://www.amazon.com/Hot-Zone-Terrifying-Story-Origins/dp/0385495226
Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak: https://www.netflix.com/title/81026143
The Vaccine: Conquering COVID: https://press.discovery.com/us/dsc/programs/vaccine-conquering-covid/

Quote:

Dr. Magda Robalo, WGH Global Managing Director, is an accomplished global health leader, trailblazer, and a leading voice for gender equality and social justice. She embodies a rich blend of technical, political, and diplomatic skills and experience, forged over thirty years of work across geographies and cultures, with diverse global, regional and local partners, governments, and communities. She is the co-founder and president of the Institute for Global Health and Development, a private, non-profit foundation, aimed at advancing women’s leadership in global health and promoting their empowerment by addressing gender inequality and stimulating financial inclusion and integration into the digital, formal economy. Dr. Magda Robalo is also the chair of the Ethics and Governance Committee of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. She is a member of the WHO Global Expert Panel on Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Management and a mentor of the Kofi Annan Global Health Program of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Links:

Quote: “The big thing back then was; How do we get people to care about health?”

Melody Schreiber is a freelance health and science journalist who regularly writes for the Guardian US, The New Republic, Scientific American, NPR, The Washington Post, and other publications. She is also editor of “What We Didn’t Expect: Personal Stories About Premature Birth.”

Links:
Melody's Personal Page: https://melodyschreiber.com/about/

Quote: "It became a continious debate over who/what would be impacted by response efforts. Was it worth closing schools to keep businesses open? Only time will tell."

From her humble start as a traveling photographer, Anna Barry-Jester walks us through how she became a public  health journalist in the midst of a recession. This exciting role investigating the intersection of health and politics came with the difficult responsibility of balancing priorities in the newsroom. Reporting on Covid-19 statistics mid- pandemic wasn't necessarily profitable to an agency, but she felt that doing so was part of her journalistic responsibility. Even then however, she (alongside many other health journalists at the time) came to realize that untangling the various threads of information and misinformation that had reached the public eye might require more concentrated efforts to break down the media's hyper-partisan tendencies and create a more unified healthcare system.

Links:
Link Tree: http://www.annabarryjester.com/