Pandemic Center

What has been your involvement with the Pandemic Center and its team or issues? What's the most important lesson you’ve learned from your involvement with the Pandemic Center? 

I participated in the Pandemic Game Changers course in this fall, where I had the privilege of learning about a host of issues and opportunities surrounding pandemic preparedness with the incredible professors Professors Beth Cameron and Wilmot James. Since then I have begun work on curriculum development for an upcoming Pandemic Game Changers workshop that will occur later this year.

The most important lesson I’ve learned from my time here has been that, in this field, it takes a village. Pandemic preparedness is particularly inter-disciplinary, and no matter what you know or what you think, you need to lean on others to get the whole picture. The people who work here really care about their work and recognize they have a lot to learn from one another, and it is really inspiring to see how they work together to do what they do.

What have been some of your goals, and how will you make a difference as a ‘game changer’?

My goals coming into involvement with the Center, which have been strengthened during my participation here, is to continue to study public health emergencies and the governance structures they affect which must remain robust to them. 

Making a difference in pandemic preparedness is tricky. There isn’t just one goal in mind, one thing that can be achieved. A career in this field isn’t about one big win - we’ll never know about the pandemic that DIDN’T hit, the failures that DIDN”T happen. Instead, this endeavor is about many small wins. Success doesn’t look like perfection, it looks like robustness. It looks like planning, communication, improved understanding, and, most importantly, more caring, capable decision makers. Right now, there’s a shortage of skilled professionals taking this issue seriously, and those that are taking it seriously, are trying their best to change that.

With that being said, my goal is to develop my own skills and competencies, and follow their lead.

What’s your advice or message to the next class of game changers and pandemic decision makers?

Public health emergencies and pandemics are rare and neither is much like the others. Preparedness isn’t about doing the right thing at the right time, but building robustness and eliminating vulnerabilities. Right now, I worry that pandemics are framed as something we expect to overwhelm us, and that the vulnerabilities we have now don’t matter because we don’t see a pandemic coming soon. I think this leads attitudes to veer too much towards ignoring those vulnerabilities and kicking the dangers down for the next generations to deal with. My advice is to think of these vulnerabilities as something real that we should be concerned about today, not just when the danger is right in front of us. For this generation, it may be possible for us to put more of these vulnerabilities into the past than has any previous generation.