My career in Epidemiology spans almost a decade, beginning when I took a post with The Phoenix Projects, an organization dedicated to the expansion of primary education, local employment, and public health. I served as a project coordinator in both Nicaragua and Guatemala where I established a clean burning stove building program, built latrines, implemented hygiene and nutritional programs, and ran childhood immunization programs in addition to coordinating with volunteers and engaging community stakeholders.

In July of 2011, an outbreak of dengue ripped through my community. Dozens of my students fell ill and my volunteers and I were afflicted as well. The community ground to a halt and I saw and felt the ravages of epidemic disease, which made me feel entirely helpless. The outbreak eventually passed, but it never really left me. I returned to the United States determined to find ways to prevent and control these outbreaks. I have been a student and practitioner of public health ever since.

I began an MPH at the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC) shortly after graduating with my bachelor’s degree. During my time at UIC, I held appointments with the Chicago Department of Public Health and the University of Illinois Department of Medicine. I worked both jobs concurrently, while earning my MPH full time. I gathered experience working on large and complex datasets and with finding, interviewing, and recruiting recent immigrants to the United States, a hard to reach population.

After graduating from UIC, I began a PhD at Louisiana State University and began working with the Health Care Services Division (HCSD) soon after. I constructed multiple studies designed to identify and eliminate barriers to adult vaccination in various populations, including persons living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). I engaged multiple stakeholders and helped secure funding for a large, multi-phase study designed to identify the barriers and facilitators to provider administration of influenza immunization in racial/ethnic minority populations. Furthermore, I secured an additional intramural grant from the Consortium for Health Transformation to research the mediating effects of negative attitudes and beliefs and healthcare access barriers on the relationship between race/ethnicity and influenza vaccination status.

My initial duties with HCSD were developing study designs, surveys, sampling and analytical methods, and study protocols. I drafted Internal Review Board applications, conducted statistical analyses, and wrote abstracts for conferences. More recently, I took on a leadership role within the organization. I started hiring, training, and supervising study staff and coordinating research activities and manuscript publication efforts. Specifically, I constructed manuscript outlines and publication schedules, led biweekly publication meetings, and supervised manuscript writing. Additionally, I have been the HCSD contact for our national stakeholders, the American College of Physicians (ACP) and the National Minority Quality Forum (NMQF). I led multiple meetings with these stakeholders in their Washington DC offices and delivered a presentation of our research at the NMQF national meeting in Washington DC.

Currently, I’m a practice-based epidemiologist, focusing on the translational science of public health. I hold joint appointments as an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology for the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) and as a Senior Epidemiologist for the Nebraska Department of Public Health. I’m a member of the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network based in the World Health Organization, Affiliated Faculty with UNMC Center for Global Health and Development, and the lead of the Applied Epidemiology Group at UNMC. I’m an alumnus of the Public Health Institute/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention joint Global Health Fellowship, where I served in the Center for Global Health in the CDC Dominican Republic Field Office and in Atlanta, GA. Also, I served on the CDC COVID-19 International Task Force as a Community Mitigation Specialist.

Think Critically,