Prof. Sprague Martinez Moderates NASEM Panel on Long COVID
Linda Sprague Martinez, associate professor at Boston University School of Social Work (BUSSW), moderated a panel for a two-day national symposium on long Covid hosted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM).
Prof. Sprague Martinez’s session focused on less-studied long COVID symptoms and gaps in evidence. The session featured the deputy chief of the Chronic Viral Diseases Branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; physicians and research scientists from MIT, Kaiser Permanente Northern California, and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; faculty from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine; and the president of Dysautonomia International.
The symposium was held at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, on June 22-23, 2023.
Prof. Sprague Martinez is an expert in health equity and community-based participatory research. She is a member of the NASEM committee examining the working definition for long COVID, and is also the director of the Health Equity Core for Harvard Medical School’s Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness focused on long COVID. As part of this work, her team conducted 11 focus groups in four languages to learn about the impacts of long COVID on diverse Black and Latinx residents in Massachusetts. She is a faculty affiliate with the BU Center for Emerging Infectious Disease Policy & Research and the co-director of the BU Clinical & Translational Science Institute’s Community Engagement Program.