I became interested in public health in high school, after reading Outbreak and Virus Hunters of the CDC. I was always interested in chemistry, math, and biology, so after graduating high school I studied microbiology at the University of Kansas. After graduating, I earned an epidemiology-focused master’s degree in international health from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where I also worked for a few years on microarray studies looking at gene expression changes after exposure to various infectious diseases such as shigella and monkeypox.

I then had the privilege of working as a contractor at HHS on Project BioShield. This was my first real exposure to government contract work, seeing how policy agendas are set, and the huge impact the work can have.

After contracts started ending for my employer with HHS, I took a position at the Sabin Vaccine Institute working on the Human Hookworm Vaccine Initiative in Washington, DC. This initiative was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. There, I worked on regulatory documentation for the FDA and managed regulatory records. I also met with vaccine development and laboratory scientists and worked on analyses to analyze cytokine data after vaccine exposure. As my interests in analyses grew, I started working on my PhD in Epidemiology at the George Washington University Milken Insitute School of Public Health, and earned my doctorate in 2016.

After finishing my coursework for the doctorate, I took a position working as a sub-contractor for the CDC. Since that time, I have been working as an independent contractor with CDC, HHS, health departments, universities, and others to provide support with study design, data analysis, reporting and interpretation. My career so far has been a dream come true!