Reflecting on One Year of MPOX Response speaker bios
Dr. Ashish Jha – A global leader driving public health research, policy, and practice, Dr. Jha joined the Brown School of Public Health as Dean in September 2020.
An accomplished and practicing physician, Dr. Jha is recognized globally as a trusted expert on major issues impacting public health, and a catalyst for new thinking and approaches. A long-time leader on pandemic preparedness and response, from directing groundbreaking research on Ebola to serving on the frontlines of the COVID-19 response, he has led national and international analysis of key issues and advised local and federal policy makers around the world.
President Joe Biden appointed Dr. Jha as White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator in March 2022, describing him as “one of the leading public health experts in America.” Dr. Jha led the work that increased the development of and access to treatments and newly formulated vaccines, dramatically improved testing and surveillance, facilitated major investments in Indoor Air Quality measures, and put in place an infrastructure to respond to current and future disease outbreaks more effectively. He has received bipartisan praise for his pragmatic approach to public health that, in the words of President Biden, “translates…complex scientific challenges into concrete actions” that help improve millions of lives.
Before joining the Brown School of Public Health, Dr. Jha was a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School. He was the faculty director of the Harvard Global Health Institute from 2014 until 2020 and has held other various leadership roles at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Dr. Jha has published nearly three hundred original research publications in prestigious journals and has consistently been ranked in the top 1% of most cited researchers. He is also a frequent contributor to a range of public media across the political spectrum, focused on how science and evidence can be used to craft better policy and improve health both in the US and around the globe.
Dr. Jha was born in Pursaulia, Bihar, India in 1970. He moved to Toronto, Canada in 1979 and then to the United States in 1983. In 1992 Dr. Jha graduated Magna Cum Laude from Columbia University with a B.A. in economics. He received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1997 and then trained as a resident in Internal Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He returned to Boston to complete his fellowship in General Medicine from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. In 2004, he completed his Master of Public Health degree at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Jha was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2013.
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis is an infectious disease physician who serves as the Deputy Coordinator of the White House National Mpox Response. Prior to his appointment, he served locally and nationally as a leader in public health as the Director for the Division of HIV Prevention at the CDC, Deputy Commissioner for the Division of Disease Control and Assistant Commissioner for the Bureau of HIV at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Dr. Daskalakis is recognized internationally as an expert in HIV prevention and has focused much of his career on the treatment and prevention of HIV and other STIs as an activist physician with a focus on LGBTQ+ communities. He has also served in leadership roles in several other public health emergencies.
He began his career as an attending physician at Bellevue Hospital in NYC where he spearheaded several public health programs focused on community HIV testing and prevention. He received his medical education from the NYU School of Medicine and completed his residency training at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He also completed clinical infectious disease fellowships at the Brigham and Women’s Massachusetts General Hospital combined program and received a Master of Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Dr. Nikki Romanik is currently serving as Chief of Staff of the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy. She has also served as Senior Policy Advisor of the White House National Mpox Response. Prior to this appointment, Nikki served as a technical expert at the World Health Organization. In this role she worked in the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Programme in the Country Readiness and Strengthening Department (CRS) where she facilitated access to COVID-19 tools Accelerator (ACT-A), with a specific focus on the horizontal cross-cutting Health System and Response Connector (HSRC) component that ensures all countries have the necessary technical, operational, and financial resources needed to translate new COVID-19 tools into national response interventions to stop transmission and save lives. In addition, Nikki developed a new partnership engagement strategy for the CRS.
While at CDC, Nikki supported the COVID-19 global response since the pandemic began. Her leadership roles include working as Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Health and Human Services on the U.S. Government’s COVID-19 Test-to-Treat Program (2022), serving as CDC Liaison to the White House and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2021-2022), working directly with the CDC Foundation to stand-up the COVID-19 Emergency Fund (2020), and standing up the Partnership Team within CDC’s COVID-19 Incident Management System (2020).
A medically trained policy and partnerships professional, Nikki has achieved nearly 15 years of experience engaging with the private sector and partners. Prior to COVID-19, Nikki served as the Special Assistant to three Directors and two Chiefs of Staff of CDC. Her portfolio included the COVID-19 Emergency Response, National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, Center for Global Health, Center for Preparedness and Response, Ebola Response and the Polio Response, serving as a policy advisor and liaison between the interagency, external partners (private sector, academic, and collaborative), multiple CDC programs and the Office of the Director.
Nikki joined CDC during the 2014-2015 Ebola Outbreak and working in the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine. She focused on interagency partner education and regulatory issues.
Prior to joining CDC, Nikki was the Executive Director and Founder of Georgia’s For a Day Foundation, a 501c3 non-profit that is committed to creating emotionally therapeutic experiences for children battling cancer and other chronic illnesses and their families through consistent quality of life programming.
Dr. Céline Gounder – Trained at Princeton University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Washington, and Harvard University, Gounder is an internationally renowned internist, infectious disease specialist, and epidemiologist. She is a CBS News Medical Contributor and a Senior Fellow and Editor-at-Large for Public Health at KFF and KFF Health News. Dr. Gounder is also a Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine and Infectious Diseases at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine. She cares for patients at Bellevue Hospital Center. She is one of the world’s leading experts in science, medicine, and public health communication.
Gounder advises local and national policymakers on issues of public health, including epidemics and pandemics, the health impacts of climate change, mental health, drug overdose, and disinformation.
Prior to joining CBS News, Gounder was a CNN Medical Analyst and a guest expert on numerous other networks. She’s written for numerous publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post. She’s a frequent guest on NPR and other radio and podcast programs, including two she produces: “American Diagnosis” and “Epidemic.”
Between 2017 and 2018, Gounder cared for patients at Indian Health Service and tribal health facilities. In early 2015, Gounder spent two months volunteering as an Ebola aid worker in Guinea. She also interviewed locals to understand how the crisis was affecting them.
Early in her career, Gounder studied HIV and tuberculosis in Brazil and southern Africa. While on faculty at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Gounder was the Director for Delivery for the Gates Foundation-funded Consortium to Respond Effectively to the AIDS/TB Epidemic. She went on to serve as Assistant Commissioner of Health for Tuberculosis at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. She received her BA in Molecular Biology from Princeton University, her Master of Science in Epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and her MD from the University of Washington. Dr. Gounder was an intern and resident in Internal Medicine at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital, and a post-doctoral fellow in Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins University.
Adrianna Boulin’s divine mission is to help humans reach their full potential. She loves creating spaces where communities can come together in authentic and unified ways that deepen our connection to ourselves, to each other and promote healing. Adrianna is interested in understanding and addressing issues at the intersection of social justice, intersectionality, and health equity.
As Director of Community Impact and Engagement at Fenway Health, Adrianna helps the organization understand the impact its programs, services, and care has on its patients, clients, and community. With that awareness she supports the organization in enhancing the experiences of our patients, clients, and community, building a culture of authentic engagement.
Prior to this role, Adrianna served as the Community Engagement Manager at Fenway Health in The Fenway Institute, the Research, Policy, Education and Training Division. Here, Adrianna’s work focused on authentic engagement, education, and clinical research recruitment in different communities to build knowledge, understanding, trust and connection in the clinical research process.
Adrianna is a member of the American Public Health Association (APHA), and Member at Large of the Council of Affiliates (CoA). The Council of Affiliates is a body of 53 state and regional public health associations across the USA. As Chair of the Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion working group of the CoA she aims to support the growth and evolution of justice in action through public health. In collaboration with two colleagues within APHA Adrianna has coauthored an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Action Toolkit geared toward supporting smaller organizations to step toward building equity, diversity, and inclusion within and throughout their organization.
Adrianna is a Board Member of SPOKE, an organization with a mission that mirrors the passion she has for healing through connection that drives social progress.
Ms. Boulin received a Master of Public Health at Northeastern University.
Dr. Nahid Bhadelia is the founding director of BU Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Policy and Research. She is a board-certified infectious diseases physician and an Associate Professor at the BU School of Medicine. She served the Senior Policy Advisor for Global COVID-19 Response for the White House COVID-19 Response Team in 2022-2023.
Between 2011-2021, Dr. Bhadelia helped develop and then served as the medical director of the Special Pathogens Unit (SPU) at Boston Medical Center, a medical unit designed to care for patients with highly communicable diseases, and a state designated Ebola Treatment Center. She is a faculty member with and was also previously an associate director for BU’s maximum containment research program, the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories. She has provided direct patient care, and been part of outbreak response and medical countermeasures research during multiple Ebola virus disease outbreaks in West and East Africa between 2014-2019. She was the clinical lead and a senior advisor for a DoD-funded viral hemorrhagic fever clinical research unit in Uganda, entitled Joint Mobile Emerging Disease Intervention Clinical Capability (JMEDICC) program between 2017 and 2022. In 2022, she also served as the testing coordinator for the White House MPOX Response Team. Currently, she is a co-director of Fogarty funded, BU-University of Liberia Emerging and Epidemic Viruses Research training program. She is part of the World Health Organization(WHO)’s Technical Advisory Group on Universal Health and Preparedness Review (UHPR) and a member of the steering committee for Massachusetts Consortium for Pathogen Readiness.