This month, we review Anthony Fauci’s new memoir On Call and present a piece from Your Local Epidemiologist covering Fauci’s recent congressional testimony. Additionally, we take a look at three great books in our summer book roundup
We continue to provide you with our popular monthly crossword feature, Notes on People, an overview of what we read from the public media, and a listing of upcoming epidemiology events. Finally, don't miss the Job Bank offerings this month. We have some fantastic opportunities advertised on our website.
Did you miss last month’s issue? Read it here: https://tinyurl.com/y8az26ku or here: https://tinyurl.com/utu2xksr
In This Issue
Anthony Fauci, The Symbol and The Scientist
Author: Madeline Roberts, PhD, MPH
Anthony Fauci’s face has become something of a post-pandemic Rorschach test, an image offering insight into the observer's pandemic experience, views on science, and political leanings. Fauci recognizes his position as a "political lightning rod," writing, "Beyond my control, I became a symbol of the profound divisiveness in our country."
Fauci’s memoir, On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service, reads like a medical time travelogue from the 1970s to the present day, guided by a poised physician-scientist navigating the major disease landmarks that have shaped the past several decades. During his nearly six-decade tenure as a public health official, he has been in the service of seven U.S. presidents and at the helm of disease response for AIDS, bioterrorism threats, anthrax, SARS, MERS, Ebola, and Zika. And, of course, COVID.
To read On Call is to look over Fauci’s shoulder as he reads a June 1981 MMWR article about a cluster of unusual pneumonia in Los Angeles, one of the first U.S. indicators of what would come to be known as AIDS. As additional clusters of Pneumocystis pneumonia and Kaposi's sarcoma are reported in New York and San Francisco, Fauci breaks with his successful immune-mediated disease research to dedicate himself to studying this novel disease. Before much was known about AIDS treatment, the book gives a point-blank look at the devastating progression of the disease and the humanity of a physician in its wake when Fauci steps out of sight and “bursts into tears” upon realizing that one of his AIDS patients
Available on Amazon.com https://tinyurl.com/4hta4prv
has gone completely blind in a matter of hours from cytomegalovirus. There was nothing he could do.
There is something to be said for engaging rather than avoiding even the most combative opponents, and Fauci developed a reputation for not only engaging with AIDS activists but also involving them in the scientific agenda. He ignored conventional wisdom and advice from colleagues to avoid Larry Kramer, an activist with a volatile reputation. Fauci believed it was critical to interact with activists, which he credits with improving the design of some clinical trials.
Fauci’s approach led to a Parallel Track initiative, an “optimal design of clinical trials that were user-friendly and still yielded valuable scientific results.”
- Fauci cont'd on page 3
The parallels between HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 are as uncanny as they are potentially instructive, perhaps especially for those who did not live through the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when it was truly novel and people were dying, while nearly nothing was known about the virus or treatments. There were pathological similarities such as asymptomatic infection and spread, and also scientific communication challenges and personal opposition. The problem of false equivalency, for example, which can arise from the otherwise advisable practice of engaging in debates with opponents or directly addressing erroneous theories; AIDS activists storming the NIH campus, some carrying “fake caskets bearing the words ‘Fuck you, Fauci’”; some writing articles calling Fauci a murderer. Maybe this is just our democratic process as it relates to epidemics. Except the proliferation of credible death threats against scientists during and after COVID have now altered the tone.
Though in the public eye, Fauci's face may be essentially equated with the COVID-19 pandemic, it comprises a relative fraction of his public health career and only one of five sections of his memoir. The book’s title stems from Fauci’s description of being on call during medical residency the grueling pattern of every other day, every other night, and every other weekend with nearly no sleep, which was at times compounded if a fellow resident fell ill: “the solution was that you just continued to be on call without relief.” This came to characterize substantial portions of his career and is at least part of what it means to be in public service or medicine.
Public health is inherently political, and perhaps nowhere is this more evident than Fauci’s career. He had one foot in the sphere of science and one in political advisory and advocacy for
most of his tenure, advancing basic and clinical research while pushing for more funding at the highest levels.
Fauci self-identifies as a “cautious optimist by nature.” A man of great precision graded to the tenth of a percentage point by Dominican nuns in primary school the influence of his Jesuit education is evident throughout his life, best captured by the phrases “precision of thought and economy of expression,” and “Men for Others.” His parents were first-generation Italian Americans who both in word and by example instilled in him diligence and devotion to serving others.
Fauci is troubled by what he calls a “crisis of truth” in American culture. He writes, “We have seen complete fabrications become some people’s accepted reality.” This erosion of truth has been happening for some time but perhaps became more conspicuous several years ago with the admission of the phrase “alternative facts” into the general lexicon. Steven Johnson writes in his book The Ghost Map on the 1854 London cholera epidemic, “Of course, for meaningful lessons to be learned from a tragedy…you have to begin by acknowledging the facts of the event itself.” Of all the plagues Fauci faced, misinformation and disinformation are among the most formidable he calls these the “true enemies of public health.” As an antidote, Fauci now seeks out the younger generation in hopes of encouraging them to pursue a life serving others. This, he says, was his chief purpose in writing his book. ■
6 foot rule, Fauci, and the bigger picture
Author: Katelyn Jetelina, PhD, MPH
NOTE: This article was originally printed in our sister publication Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE) on June 11, 2024
Last week, Fauci testified before a special House subcommittee. While the subcommittee’s main focus was Covid-19 origins, other topics snuck in, including the 6-foot social distancing policy during the pandemic. This was a key measure taken to slow down spread, including at schools, businesses, and places of worship.
A level-headed evaluation of decisions and policies made during the pandemic is helpful and needed, but that’s not at all what happened here. Instead, there were empty, unhelpful questions lacking nuance and depth, and at worst, unhinged harassment of public servants.
The result? A dangerous wave of “pandemic revisionism”—headlines and viral social media accounts taking soundbites of the hearing and concluding that pandemic policies were worthless or that public health officials just made stuff up.
Americans deserve (and need) so much better.
6-foot rule: Where did it come from?
Last week, the subcommittee blamed Fauci for the 6-foot policy. Fauci responded saying he was unaware of studies supporting the 6-foot social distancing guidelines. He then clarified that it wasn’t based on randomized control trials.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testifies during a House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus pandemic at Capitol Hill, Monday, June 3, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)
There are a few problems with this exchange:
1. This wasn’t a Fauci decision. The 6-foot guideline was decided by CDC.
2. This policy wasn’t pulled out of thin air. During the Bush administration, this key strategy was put into the pandemic playbook in 2007 and again in 2017. It was based on our knowledge of flu at the time, which showed droplets as a main form of transmission (rather than aerosols). Given that Covid-19 was a novel virus, pulling from a pandemic playbook was the right decision.
3. Even though 6 feet was not the “perfect distance,” it still helped prevent transmission.
4. The mistake was not updating the policy quickly enough. It turns out Covid-19 has droplets, but its main mode of transmission is aerosols (i.e., airborne). In the summer of 2020, more than 200 scientists sent a letter to the WHO urging them to recognize this, as it would impact policy decisions. However, it took over a year for the CDC and WHO to officially recognize it. Why? And why did the U.S. go with 6 feet while the WHO went with 1 meter? Now, these are questions that would be useful to answer.
5. You won’t get a randomized control trial in times of an emergency. We were losing thousands of people per day. We have to move quickly and with suboptimal information. This is why preparedness is so important. Even so, some questions we ethically can’t answer with an RCT.
6. It ignores what we learned. When the world works on one thing, we learn leaps and bounds. One example is how much we learned about the power of air ventilation and filtration.
Attacking scientists is also not the answer.
It’s reasonable to ask Fauci why he made certain decisions, what conversations he was a part of, or what his thinking was at the time. After all, he was one of the key decision-makers.
However, vilifying, attacking, and ripping apart public servants is unacceptable, undeserved, and certainly unhelpful in propelling us forward. Some tweets, like the one below by Elon Musk, was viewed more than 44 million times.
Public health leaders stepped up during a time of great uncertainty using systems too old to succeed while losing, at its peak, 3,500 people a day. They had to make incredibly difficult decisions, often with incomplete information, many of which were valid decisions based on the data at the time. Yes, they made mistakes, but their service was heroic and patriotic, too. We can live with these two truths. If not, we risk losing public health leaders why would someone step up when this is how they’re treated?
We need a far better approach.
A proper diagnosis with the breadth, depth, and fairness the Covid-19 emergency deserves, driven by critical thinking and diverse perspectives:
Why weren’t we prepared?
What decisions were made, when, why, and by whom?
What mistakes were unavoidable and avoidable?
What could have saved more lives?
How could we have a better balanced, holistic view of health?
What tangible steps will be taken to do better in the future?
There is precedent for such an approach: the 9/11 Commission. However, a united, national diagnosis seems less likely as the months pass.
Thankfully, some groups have taken it upon themselves to start patching together answers:
State-level diagnoses, like New Jersey
Books like Lessons from the Covid-19 War: An investigative report
Reports from independent organizations, like American Democracy & Health
Security: Lighting a Path Forward Amid Pandemic Polarization
Will this be enough for the future? Especially with no funding to make the changes needed? Time will tell, but this is a gamble given that health threats are coming faster.
- 6 Foot cont'd on page 7
Bottom line
The United States lost more than 1 million lives—worse per capita than any other developed nation. We deserve to know why and what steps are needed to ensure this doesn’t happen again. However, resorting to unhinged
attacks and disingenuous waves of pandemic revisionism will only hurt us in the end. ■
Subscribe to Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE): https://tinyurl.com/47494ms4
Do you have an idea for an EpiMonitor article?
We love epidemiology and welcome thoughtful and timely contributions to the field. A review of our past newsletters is the best gauge for the type of content we publish.
Please submit your full article as a Word document; submissions should be 800-1000 words. Please include who you are, your current affiliation, and any relevant background, including your qualifications to write on your chosen topic. Conflicts of interest current or potential, financial or favor must be disclosed. We read all submissions; if your submission is selected, you will receive an email from our Research Director.
Contact madeline@epimonitor.net to set up an email Q&A, or you can submit for consideration an article about your work.
EpiMonitor Summer Book Roundup
Author: Madeline Roberts, PhD, MPH
The final weeks of summer often bring the ambivalence of looking for a respite from the heat while also wanting to cling to the last bit of the season. Whether you find yourself at the beach, poolside, or simply with a bit of extra time on your hands, you may want a book on hand. We’ve rounded up a few that we’ve been thinking about, and we hope they spark your interest and thinking.
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
by Hans Rosling with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund
In the age of disinformation and misinformation, we’re revisiting a 2018 Hans Rosling book for a refresher on the “the stress-reducing habit of carrying only the opinions for which you have strong supporting facts.” Published posthumously with his daughter-in-law Anna Rosling Rönnlund and son Ola Rosling, the authors describe this book as “data as therapy.”
The book is organized into ten human instincts which tend to distort our perceptions of the world. Each chapter concludes with a succinct description that brings “factfulness” to bear on the erroneous instinct. For example, the size instinct makes numbers in isolation impressive; “to control the size instinct, get things in proportion.”
Rosling writes, “I'm a very serious "possibilist". That's something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful." Also, watch Hans Rosling encourage his audience to “think beyond the obvious” as he swallows a Swedish army bayonet near the end of his TED talk “New Insights on Poverty” (around minute 17:20).
The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World by Steven Johnson
If you’re an epidemiology enthusiast or want to renew your active appreciation for the marvel that is sanitation infrastructure, this is your book. Regarded as the father of modern epidemiology, one of the original geospatial analysts, and the exemplar of Intro Epidemiology classes, John Snow is the original epidemiology icon. The Ghost Map brings his story alive in technicolor within the context of the 1854 London cholera outbreak. Author Steven Johnson humanizes a historic outbreak and weaves together Victorian newspaper and magazine reports, disease transmission theories old and new,
and vivid literary descriptions of what the streets of London were like in the Victorian era from Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew.
Johnson added an afterword in 2023 reflecting on COVID in view of the 1854 cholera epidemic. He underscores that even in the face of COVID denialism, the evidence indicates that we are learning from this epidemic, citing mRNA vaccines and the controversial lockdowns.
Considering the entire history of disease and human response, he offers an interesting perspective: “The period from March 2020 to May 2020 almost certainly marked the most significant short-term change ever in worldwide human behavior. Vast sections of the planet effectively froze in place…and then adopted a whole new set of routines to flatten the curve and slow the spread a genuinely new trick for Homo sapiens. It was not obvious in advance that such a thing was even possible.”
This book also serves as a sobering reminder that an estimated 40% percent of the world still lacks sanitation facilities, which puts a considerable proportion of the global population at risk for myriad infectious diseases. Safely managed sanitation is one of the most basic and powerful interventions to advocate for and work toward.
The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday
“The things which hurt, instruct.” Benjamin Franklin “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.” Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel
Although more of a business or personal development book, The Obstacle may also offer some perspective for the post-pandemic public health reorg in which we find ourselves. To navigate crises, Holiday outlines Stoic principles such as ruthlessly objective thinking and purposeful action as the path to resilience. He repeatedly reminds that it is possible for opportunity to present itself in the form of overwhelming obstacles.
There is likely some measure of selection bias in the presented case studies and historical anecdotes of successful people, and, at times, The Obstacle felt trite and in the pull-yourself-up-by-thebootstraps genre. However, it also advocates for viewing problems and challenges as opportunities rather than threats. One of the primary benefits of remaining objective is that removing emotions and reputation from consideration allows a broader domain of solutions and actions to emerge by eliminating the need to save face.
Public health, both as an entity and as a collection of individual professionals, is recovering from an extraordinary ordeal. The Obstacle urges readers to “[understand] our problems for what’s within them and their greater context,” and to have “an eye for opportunity and pivotal moments.” And surely there has not been a more pivotal moment for public health in recent history.
Across
1. One of 32 sports in 2024 Olympic games
5. Water ____, one of 32 sports...
9. Early computer language
14. Biblical shepherd
15. One way to get from here to there
16. Prefix with marathon
17. Slinky, e.g.
18. Type of management in the NBA
19. Manila envelope feature
20. USA hope for swimming gold at 2024 Olympics
23. Eye sores
24. Cape of Good Hope country: Abbr.
25. Ground cover
28. 2024 Olympic games host city
33. _._._.F. (expression at end of workweek)
36. Brain and spinal cord are part of this: Abbr.
37. Give a speech
38. "____, higher, ____" (Olympics motto, in English)
42. Antiquated
43. "Old MacDonald" refrain letters
44. Bone prefix
45. USA hope for gymnastics gold at 2024 Olympics
49. -Cones
50. Car crash: Abbr.
51. Boston Celtics star at the 2024 Olympics
56. WNBA star competing in her 6th Olympics
60. 1988 Summer Olympics site
63. Cancels
64. Airline based at TLV
65. Cabin Masters’ home turf
66. Call at the deli counter
67. Et ___
68. Broods
69. Voice below soprano
70. In rhyme, city of sin ("you never come out, the way you came in")
Down
1. Kids game with a small ball
2. W.W. II subsurface menace
3. Zeus, for one
4. Stan's comedic partner 1927-1955
5. Skeetshooter yell
6. Instrument portraying the duck in "Peter and the Wolf"
7. It's been linked to lower IQs in children
8. Word after marching or doctor's
9. Cowboy
10. Friend in war
11. RR stop
12. Form 1040 org.
13. 20-Across will wear one while competing
21. Clairvoyance, e.g.
22. Liquid in 36-Across: Abbr.
25. Hitches
26. Four times as large as a duo
27. Last name in farm equipment
29. Point and no return, in tennis
30. Furlough activity, for short
31. Japanese immigrant
32. Florence's river
33. Clemens' pen name
34. Contraption
35. Assuming that's true
38. Statistical software package first released in 1968
39. 16.0934 kilometers, to Americans
40. "Shop ___ you drop"
41. Caviar
46. ___ Marie Saint, Turner Classic Movies focus in July 2024
47. Good source of potassium
48. Nickname that's three consecutive letters of the alphabet
52. "He's ___ nowhere man" (Beatles lyric)
53. Add up
54. First name among Jamaica's track stars
55. Italy's fashion capital
56. What 51-Across might do for two points
57. Midori Ito was the first woman to land a triple of this
58. Preferred communication mode of Gen Z
59. About
60. Initials for 58-Down
61. Évian, e.g.
62. Argan or patchouli
What We're Reading This Month
Editor's Note: All of us are confronted with more material than we can possibly hope to digest each month. However, that doesn't mean that we should miss some of the articles that appear in the public media on topics of interest to the epi community. The EpiMonitor curates a monthly list of some of the best articles we've encountered in the past month. See something you think others would like to read? Please send us a link at info@epimonitor.net and we'll include it in the next month
Public Health Topics
♦ Disease Emerges as New Threat After Polio Found in War-Battered Gaza (WSJ)
https://tinyurl.com/7smpn7z8
♦ The Killer Stalking Sri Lanka’s Men (NY Times)
https://tinyurl.com/yc7cyaah
♦ ‘We’re Living in a Nightmare:’ Inside the Health Crisis of a Texas Bitcoin Town (Time)
https://tinyurl.com/fsm7df3f
♦ Where Your Ancestors Lived More Than Your Race May Explain Key Health Disparities (TX Monthly)
https://tinyurl.com/4w6bfxea
♦ Research pair finds Gen X people more susceptible to many types of cancers than prior generations (MedicalXpress)
https://tinyurl.com/hryf3ev4
♦ Could cow vaccines help halt the spread of bird flu in U.S. herds? Experts are divided (STAT)
https://tinyurl.com/mmnm726a
♦ Pattern of Brain Damage Is Pervasive in Navy SEALs Who Died by Suicide (NY Times)
https://tinyurl.com/4r22j8bc
♦ A protein called Reelin keeps popping up in brains that resist aging and Alzheimer’s (NPR) https://tinyurl.com/553dduyc
♦ What makes a public health campaign successful? (MedicalXpress)
https://tinyurl.com/rsskjyah
The full study can be accessed here: https://tinyurl.com/2ttbnduc
[Type a quote from the document or the summary of an interesting point. You can position the text box anywhere in the document. Use the Text Box Tools tab to change the formatting of the pull quote text box.]
- con't from page 13
COVID-19
♦ Improving COVID-19 Epidemiology Through a Health Equity Lens (ID Society)
https://tinyurl.com/4skpf69z
♦ Why are COVID-19 cases spiking again? (Time)
https://tinyurl.com/yc6anzmy
♦ What is the risk of getting long COVID in 2024? (Time)
https://tinyurl.com/y6e36mnj
♦ Why Covid is surging this summer and what health experts say has changed (STAT)
https://tinyurl.com/38v9h2tm
♦ Map shows states where COVID levels are "high" or "very high" as summer wave spreads (CBS News)
https://tinyurl.com/27k6sxk2
Your Ad Should Be Here
Do you have a job, course, conference, book or other resource of interest to the epidemiology community? Advertise with The Epidemiology Monitor and reach 35,000 epidemiologists, biostatisticians, and public health professionals monthly. Advertising opportunities exist in this digital publication, on our website and Facebook page, and in our Epi-Gram emails. For more information please contact:
Notes on People
D
o you have news about yourself, a colleague, or a student?
Please help The Epidemiology Monitor keep the community informed by sending relevant news to us at this address for inclusion in our next issue. people@epimonitor.net
Awarded: Scott Proescholdbell, MPH is a public health epidemiologist and unit manager for the Epidemiology, Surveillance, and Informatics Unit of DPH’s Injury and Violence Prevention Branch and has more than 20 years of service with North Carolina. His efforts have significantly advanced the state’s injury and violence prevention surveillance, bringing recognition, funding and policy improvements for critical public health issues, such as substance use and violence prevention, both within North Carolina and nationally. The Ronald H. Levine Public Health Award recognizes exemplary contributions to public health in North Carolina. This prestigious award is named for former State Health Director Dr. Ron Levine. https://tinyurl.com/4zc9x3d6
Appointed: Yale School of Public Health has announced the appointment of Lee Kennedy-Shaffer as an assistant professor in the department of biostatistics. Kennedy-Shaffer, BS ’13 (mathematics), joins YSPH from Vassar College, where he has been an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics since 2020. Prior to that appointment, he served as a postdoctoral researcher with the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard.
Appointed: Qiao Liu, PhD has been appointed an assistant professor in the department of biostatistics at the Yale School of Public Health. Liu comes to YSPH from Stanford University, where he has been a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Statistics since 2021. earned a BS from ShenYuan Honors College at Beihang University in Beijing in 2016 and a PhD in Bioinformatics from Tsinghua University in Beijing in 2021. Since 2019, Liu has been conducting extensive research at Stanford Statistics, initially as a visiting PhD student, and later transitioning into a postdoc.
Awarded: The Society for Epidemiologic Research presented its Roger Detels Distinguished Researcher Award in Infectious Disease Epidemiology to William Schaffner, MD. Dr. Schaffner is a Professor of Preventive Medicine in the Department of Health Policy and a Professor of Infectious Disease at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Dr. Schaffner's primary interest has been the prevention of infectious diseases and he is the current Medical Director and past president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases and has served on the Executive Board for the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
Notes on People
Do you have news about yourself, a colleague, or a student?
Please help The Epidemiology Monitor keep the community informed by sending relevant news to us at this address for inclusion in our next issue. people@epimonitor.net
Featured: Zilong Wang, a Chinese native who was attending Xi’an JiaotongLiverpool University, has seen his dream come true by gaining admission to Harvard University’s biostatistics program. Prior to attending Harvard he also spent a year at Berkeley. The heartwarming feature story details how is perseverance helped him overcome the long odds to gain admission to Harvard. Full article: https://tinyurl.com/2dn8ah7a
Passed: Retired NIH biostatistician Raymond Charles Boston of West Chester, PA passed away on June 29, 2024 in Chestertown, MD. A native of Melbourne, Australia he became a research scientist at the National Institute of Health and a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania for the remainder of his career. As a biomathematician and biostatistician his research included areas ranging from veterinary to medical to epidemiological issues. Ray lectured and taught at institutions across the world; from Glasgow to Taipei to Finland, etc. And most recently in Melbourne Australia, where he assisted with clinical research projects at St Vincent’s hospital. In the field of biomathematical modeling he contributed significantly to the development of the Winsaam program, used by research scientists around the world. Ray was also a member of the prestigious selection committee at the Franklin Institute. https://tinyurl.com/2eupt5nr
Passed: VCU professor David Charles Wheeler III passed away on June 29th, 2024 after a lengthy battle with brain cancer. David was an internationally recognized biostatistician with a focus on spatial, cancer, and environmental epidemiology. He served as the Principal Investigator on more than 15 major grants most of which were funded by the National Cancer Institute. His research demonstrated the importance of considering environmental exposures decades prior to diagnosis, identifying important historical risk patterns for cancer (clusters) utilizing environmental risk analysis and associations between neighborhood deprivation and myriad health-related outcomes. His prolific scholarly contributions include 110 peer-reviewed publications with more than 7,650 citations (to date). David also served on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. https://tinyurl.com/567jsynd
Near Term Epidemiology Event Calendar
Every December The Epidemiology Monitor dedicates that issue to a calendar of events for the upcoming year. However that often means we don't have full information for events later in the upcoming year. Thus an online copy exists on our website that is updated regularly. To view the full year please go to: http://www.epimonitor.net/Events The events that we are aware of for the next month follow below.
August 2024
August 3-8
https://tinyurl.com/ewaekf3w Conference: JSM 2024 (Joint Statistics Meeting) / American Statistical Association / Portland, OR
August 15-16
https://tinyurl.com/2yz5dchm Conference: 7th International Conference on Public Health (ICOPH 2024) / Multiple / Bangkok, Thailand & Virtual
https://tinyurl.com/rxykuhmw Conference: 21st Biennial Congress - EPA Section of Epidemiology & Social Psychiatry / European Psychiatric Association / Lausanne, Switzerland
September 12-15
https://bit.ly/3PBGvME Conference: 11th Southeast Asia and Western Pacific Bi-regional TEPHINET Scientific Conference / SAFETYNET & Australia National University / Canberra, Australia
September 17-20
https://tinyurl.com/6325d68j Conference: Conference on Drug Development to Meet the Challenge of Antimicrobial Resistance / ESCMID – ASM / Porto, Portugal
September 18-20
http://tinyurl.com/ycx5nsbt Short Course: Genomic Epidemiology of Malaria / Wellcome Connecting Science
September 20-23
https://tinyurl.com/msf42z4b Conference: 8th World One Health Congress / UN, WHO and others / Cape Town, South Africa
September 24-27
https://tinyurl.com/k2r4ybru Conference: IEA World Congress of Epidemiology / Multiple sponsors / Cape Town, South Africa
September TBD
https://bit.ly/3DV3zhY Conference: American College of Epidemiology Annual Conference / ACE / Scottsdale, AZ
Biostatistics Director
The University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center (UMGCCC) & the Department of Epidemiology & Public Health (DEPH) are accepting nominations/applications for director of Biostatics Shared Resource/Division of Biostatistics, a dual-purpose entity that serves as a Shared Resource within UMGCCC and a division within DEPH. The ideal candidate will serve as director of both based on overall qualifications and leadership experience. The director will hold an academic appointment in DEPH and Program in Oncology membership in UMGCCC. DEPH and the Program in Oncology are part of the University of Maryland School of Medicine (SOM) located on the University of Maryland Baltimore campus in downtown Baltimore.
The DEPH Division of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics is the academic home of 15 faculty and has an excellent record covering the full spectrum of biostatistics and methodological research via collaborative research in biomedicine to biostatistics education and training. The mission of the division is to excel in biostatistics and bioinformatics education/training; to conduct high-quality methodological and collaborative biostatistics/bioinformatics research; and to provide an essential component of the scientific basis for quantitative biomedical research throughout UMGCCC, the Medical Center and the University of Maryland. Members of the division teach and provide mentorship to medical students, masters and doctoral students, and MPH students, and leadership of a new track in biostatistics in the Epidemiology and Human Genetics Doctoral Program
The director should ideally be an NIH funded investigator, at the academic rank of associate professor or above. The director will be a member of UMGCCC Shared Resources senior leadership, the UMGCCC Research Council and DEPH leadership with responsibilities spanning the School of Medicine and the University. The director will play a significant role in the UMGCCC NCI Cancer Center Support Grant and the UMGCCC clinical research enterprise.
The ideal candidate will:
Have an established track record of peer-reviewed extramural research funding and national/international reputation as evidenced by service on national, regional, and local organizations and professional societies.
► Have a documented record of scholarship in biostatistics and data science, preferably applied in oncology. Experience in clinical trial design and analysis is highly desirable.
► Along with UMB, DEPH and UMGCCC leadership, the director will be primarily responsible for maintaining and expanding a Shared Resource that spans and takes advantage of existing collaborations between the University of Maryland Baltimore and the University of Maryland College Park campuses. A co-director of UMGCCC Biostatistics Shared Resources will be physically located at the College Park campus.
► Possess strategic and innovative thinking abilities to identify research gaps and anticipate research directions and opportunities.
► Have exceptional leadership and mentorship skills to advance careers of faculty, trainees, and staff.
► Foster awareness and support of departmental and cancer center initiatives to support inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility, and cancer health equity efforts throughout the institution.
► Demonstrate ability to understand and advance the needs of UMGCCC and DEPH within the SOM, across UM campuses and University of Maryland Medical System and the UMGCCC catchment area.
► Have excellent oral and written communication skills. Candidates should apply online at https://umb.taleo.net/careersection/jobdetail.ftl?job=24000145&lang=en and should reference FRIS #03-307-173 and submit a letter of introduction, a CV, a Statement on Diversity and a Research Interest Plan. More info: http://www.epimonitor.net/2024-3879-Epidemiology-Job-Opening.htm
The Epidemiology Monitor ISSN (2833-1710) is published monthly
The Epidemiology Monitor
Editorial Contributors
Katelyn Jetelina, PhD, MPH Editor and Publisher
Operations
Christopher Jetelina Operations Manager
Advertising Sales
Michele Gibson sales@epimonitor.net
Advertising Rates
All
in a Digital Version is available FREE to subscribers
The Epidemiology Monitor is available exclusively online in the same familiar print format subscribers were accustomed to, and they can read through the publication on their electronic devices in the same manner they did with the print version. In addition, you can download and save copies of The Epidemiology Monitor for easy future access.
