Richard Hopkins’s BA degree is from Harvard College (1968), his MD from the University of Pennsylvania (1974), and his MSPH from the University of Colorado (1987). Dr. Hopkins has worked as a public health epidemiologist since 1977. He worked longest in Florida (19 years), and also in Montana, Colorado, West Virginia, and Ohio. Dr. Hopkins was on the preventive medicine faculty of Ohio State University 1987-1990. In the early 2000s he spent 1.5 years working for a large IT company, and 1.5 years in Public Health Surveillance and Informatics at CDC. He has worked on infectious diseases, injuries, maternal and child health outcomes, chronic diseases, and birth defects — always with a focus on surveillance. He helped lead CSTE’s efforts in the late 1990s to develop a set of 80-some chronic disease items to be put under surveillance nationwide. He also oversaw the 2001 design and development of Merlin, Florida’s web-based reportable disease information system, and the 2007 adoption of ESSENCE as Florida’s standard system for syndromic surveillance, and helped assure the incorporation of 3 other streams of surveillance data into the ESSENCE analytic environment. The latter effort won a HIMSS Davies Award. Currently Dr. Hopkins is doing consulting work for CSTE and Florida DOH, and he is a Courtesy Associate Professor at the University of Florida.
Aaron Kite-Powell, MS
Board Vice-President
Term: 2012-2014
Aaron Kite-Powell is an epidemiologist with MIT Lincoln Laboratory (MIT-LL). Prior to working with MIT-LL Aaron Kite-Powell was a surveillance epidemiologist with the Bureau of Epidemiology, Florida Department of Health and is the ESSENCE-Florida System Coordinator. In this capacity, he manages Florida’s ESSENCE system, which was one of two winners of the HIMSS Public Health Davies Award in 2011. He is responsible for project management, coordination of system and data source development, system testing, monitoring and analysis, training, and coordination with Florida’s state and county health department users. Aaron began his work with the Florida Department of Health in 2007 with the primary task of implementing a statewide syndromic surveillance system. Prior to this work, he graduated with an M.S. from the Oregon State University Department of Public Health in 2003. After graduation, he worked at the local level in Maryland with a focus on environmental health and mapping. To pursue his interest in epidemiology and disease surveillance, he applied and was accepted in 2005 to the Florida Epidemic Intelligence Service Fellowship, a 2 year post-graduate applied epidemiology training program modeled after the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service. During these 2 years, his primary responsibilities were to expand syndromic surveillance coverage in Broward County, FL, including recruitment of hospitals, routine monitoring and analysis, reportable disease case investigation, and assistance with outbreak investigations. During this time, he was also deployed to the coastal counties of Mississippi, where he was a part of a team tasked with enhancing acute disease surveillance in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina. Shortly thereafter he led similar post-disaster surveillance activities after Hurricane Wilma in Broward County.
Since his work in Florida began in 2005, Aaron has presented at every ISDS conference, conducted webinars, been an active member of the Public Health Practice Committee, and coordinated the development of two pre-conference workshops.
Bill Lober, MD, MS
Board Vice-President
Term: 2011-2013
Bill Lober is an Associate Professor, in the University of Washington (UW) Schools of Medicine, Nursing, and Public Health (joint), in health informatics. Dr. Lober is Director of the UW Clinical Informatics Research Group, Director of Informatics for the International Training and Education Center on HIV (I-TECH), and Associate Director of the UW Center for Public Health Informatics. His research focuses on the development, integration, and evaluation of information systems to support individual and population health. His academic interests include information system-based surveillance; web-based information systems; support of population-based research in public health and biomedical research; computer supported collaborative work; and privacy and security. His research employs heterogeneous data integration, web infrastructures, distributed security models, and usability assessment. Funded research includes 1) public health information exchange architectures, 2) electronic forms-based disease reporting, 3) architecture, algorithms, and visualization strategies for integrated surveillance, and 4) population-based and electronic health record systems that support clinical care, program monitoring, and evaluation and biomedical research in HIV/AIDS.
Dr. Lober was the Organizing Chair of the 2005 Syndromic Surveillance Conference, and a founding Co-Editor of Advances in Disease Surveillance. He has served on the ISDS Board since 2005, and has had conference and committee roles in AMIA, CSTE, Washington DOH, and other organizations. Dr. Lober graduated from the UCSF/UC Berkeley Joint Medical Program, completed his residency in Emergency Medicine at University of Arizona, and was board certified (ABEM) in EM. He also completed a National Library of Medicine fellowship in Medical Informatics. In addition to his clinical training, he has a BSEE in Electrical Engineering from Tufts University, graduate training in Computer Engineering, and 10 years of industry experience in hardware and software engineering.
Joseph S. Lombardo, MS
Board Treasurer
Term: 2012-2014
Joe Lombardo has been actively engaged in the National Syndromic Surveillance Conferences and the International Society for Disease Surveillance since their origins. He has degrees in engineering from the University of Illinois and the Johns Hopkins University. He was the William S. Parsons Informatics Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His interests are the development of automated tools to support the public health surveillance mission using methods that provide for both early alerting and high specificity. He was the principal investigator for the research and development of the ESSENCE disease surveillance application. In 2006, he was the Organizing Chair for the Syndromic Surveillance Conference and was Co-Editor of the textbook Disease Surveillance published by John Wiley and Sons. He is currently a principal investigator for one of the CDC Academic Centers of Excellence in Public Health Informatics, located at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
Atar Baer, PhD, MPH
Term: 2012 – 2014
Atar Baer is an epidemiologist at Public Health – Seattle & King County with the Communicable Disease & Epidemiology Section, where she serves as the county’s biosurveillance system coordinator. In this capacity, she designs and manages systems for conducting communicable disease surveillance; develops databases and tools to support the section’s surveillance objectives; helps conduct outbreak investigations; and manages and evaluates the section’s biosurveillance system.
Atar is a long-time ISDS member. She has participated in conference or pre-conference workshop planning every year since 2005, and served as the scientific program chair for the 2010 ISDS conference in Park City, Utah. She has been active in the Education and Training and Public Health Practice workgroups, and the Distribute Community of Practice, where she has promoted strategies for improving data quality and standardizing syndrome classification.
Dr. Baer holds a PhD in epidemiology from the University of Washington in Seattle and an MPH in epidemiology from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
John Brownstein, PhD
Term: 2011-2013
John S. Brownstein is an Instructor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and has joint appointments in the Children’s Hospital Boston Informatics Program at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and the Division of Emergency Medicine. Dr. Brownstein was trained as an epidemiologist at Yale University where he received his PhD. Dr. Brownstein works on novel statistical modeling and medical informatics approaches for accelerating the translation of public health surveillance research into practice. This research has focused on a variety of infectious diseases including malaria, dengue, HIV, West Nile virus, Lyme disease, RSV and influenza. In particular, his work published in the American Journal of Epidemiology was used as key evidence for the recent decision by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend universal influenza vaccination for all children under five. He is also leading the development several novel disease surveillance systems, including HealthMap.org, an internet-based global infectious disease intelligence system.
Dr. Brownstein has advised the Institute of Medicine, the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the White House on real-time public health surveillance. He has used this experience in his role as Epidemiology Research Chair for the International Society for Disease Surveillance for which he has helped define future initiatives. He also served as a Track Chair for the 2007 Syndromic Surveillance Conference. He has authored over twenty peer-reviewed articles in the area of disease surveillance. This work has been reported on widely including pieces in Science, Nature, New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, National Public Radio and the BBC.
Jean-Paul Chretien, MD, PhD, MHS
Term: 2012-2014
A Navy medical officer, Jean-Paul served in Helmand Province, Afghanistan from March 2011-February 2012, leading public health policy and programs for ~40,000 NATO forces from 6 countries. He also led public health capacity building among Afghan security forces. Previously, at the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center (AFHSC), Jean-Paul coordinated DoD international public health partnerships and led infectious disease modeling and prediction initiatives. He returns to the AFHSC in July 2012.
Jean-Paul graduated from the US Naval Academy, where he was Truman Scholar. He received his MD from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and PhD (Epidemiology) and MHS (Biostatistics) from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He completed an Informatics fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and residency in Preventive Medicine at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. He is Board-Certified in Preventive Medicine.
In 2012, Jean-Paul received the William Kane Rising Star Award from the American College of Preventive Medicine. He has published more than 30 papers, including first-author papers in the New England Journal of Medicine and Journal of the American Medical Association, and serves on the editorial board of Global Health Governance. He represented the DoD on the National Biosurveillance Advisory Subcommittee and at the Biological Weapons Convention Meeting of Experts.
Jean-Paul is adjunct faculty in the Department of Preventive Medicine and Biometrics at the Uniformed Services University, a Term Member in the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Fellow of the Truman National Security Project.
Amy Ising, MS
Term: 2013-2015
Amy Ising is the Program Director for North Carolina’s statewide syndromic surveillance system, NC DETECT. NC DETECT is managed at the Carolina Center for Health Informatics in the Department of Emergency Medicine at UNC Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) under contract to and in close collaboration with the North Carolina Division of Public Health. Ms. Ising has contributed to the design, development, implementation and maintenance of NC DETECT and its precursor NCEDD since 2000. She has been a co- investigator on several health informatics and biosurveillance-related research projects. Ms. Ising is adjunct faculty in the Department of Epidemiology at the UNC-CH Gillings School of Global Public Health, where she teaches introductory graduate-level courses on public health informatics. She received a B.A. with Distinction from the University of Virginia, and a M.S. in Information Science and Certificate in Field Epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Ms. Ising has been an active participant in ISDS since 2004 and is looking forward to attending her ninth ISDS conference this December. She has served on three conference organizing committees and is the 2012 Scientific Program Chair. Ms. Ising also served on the first ISDS Meaningful Use Workgroup that produced the ISDS Emergency Department and Urgent Care Recommendations.
Larissa May, MD, DrPH
Term: 2013-2014
Larissa May, MD, MSPH is Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Board certified in emergency medicine, she also holds a master’s degree in public health microbiology and emerging infectious diseases. Dr May’s areas of expertise are the use of the electronic health record for emergency department based clinical and public health surveillance research as well as the application of syndromic surveillance in low and medium resource settings. Dr. May has lectured extensively on syndromic surveillance and public health preparedness to both public health practitioners and clinicians and has authored over twenty peer-reviewed papers, abstracts, and chapters in the area of infectious disease epidemiology, training, and public health surveillance. She has served as a consultant and subject matter expert for the Department of Defense in the development and evaluation of several syndromic surveillance systems.
Dr. May has been an active member of ISDS since 2006 and the Chair of the ISDS Education and Training Committee since 2008 and has sought to bridge the gap between public health and clinician stakeholders. Her accomplishments in this role include successfully leading the development and implementation of the NACCHO funded ISDS online continuing education course “Syndromic Surveillance 101: An Introduction to Syndromic Surveillance for Clinicians and Public Health Practitioners”, which she co-directs with Julie Pavlin. She has participated in the planning of the pre-conference workshop for the past four years and has taught the introductory syndromic surveillance lecture at the ISDS annual meeting since 2009. She has contributed to the ISDS blog and participated in webinars and presentations to promote Syndromic 101. In addition, as a member of the ISDS global outreach committee, she helped develop a database of articles on the global use of syndromic surveillance which was published in the ISDS Network newsletter in 2009. Most recently, from 2011-2012, she served as a clinical expert on the ISDS meaningful use workgroup for inpatient and ambulatory electronic health record data.
Scott McNabb, PhD, MS
Term: 2013-2015
Prior to joining the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) and serving the 2-year EIS residency in New Orleans, LA, Dr. McNabb worked for 13 years at the Oklahoma State Health Department. Since 1993, most of his professional efforts have focused on supporting those in underdeveloped, underserved global settings. Before retirement from CDC in 2010, he served as Associate Director for Science; Public Health Informatics and Technology Program Office; Office for Surveillance, Epidemiology, and Laboratory Services. From 2006 – 2008, he directed the Division of Integrated Surveillance Systems and Services, National Center for Public Health Informatics, CDC. He is Research Professor and Director of the King Abdullah Fellowship Program at Emory University, Rollins School of Public Health. Teaching two classes, GH 504 Effective Oral Presentations for Public Health Professionals and GH 592 Successful Scientific Writing forPublic Health Professionals, he also teaches in a short-course format: Successful Scientific Writing and Effective Oral Communications and in the University of Michigan Graduate Summer Session. Having mentored 19 students through their M.P.H. or Ph.D., plus 14 fellows through the CDC Public Health Prevention Specialists program, he is jointly appointed in the Hubert Department of Global Health and Department of Epidemiology. He holds an appointment as Adjunct Professor, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, College of Public Health and Health Informatics, King Saud Bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Dr. McNabb serves on the Editorial Board, Epidemiology and Global Health and in private practice as a Board Member of Ascel Bio, LLC; Senior Consultant and Managing Partner, Public Health Practice, LLC; and Senior Consultant, Global Strategies, LLC. His team is conducting a pre- conference workshop in the upcoming 2012 ISDS annual meeting, and has two papers to present. Dr. McNabb will also moderate a panel discussion.
Rosalie Phillips, MPH
Secretary (2013)
Rosalie Phillips is Executive Director of Tufts Health Care Institute (THCI) and Director of the Office of Continuing Education (OCE) of Tufts University School of Medicine (TUSM). Ms Phillips is responsible for the overall planning, development and management of THCI and the TUSM OCE. She leads initiatives to develop and disseminate THCI’s and the OCE’s educational and training resources for health professionals, with the ultimate goal of improving patient care through education. She was the principal investigator and project director for THCI’s online learning dissemination project, funded through the U.S. Department of Education.
Ms. Phillips has had more than 30 years of experience in health plans and academic medical settings. She has held a range of managerial, staff, and research positions in health care organizations, including 10 years as a senior manager at the Harvard Community Health Plan. Prior to her current position, she was vice president for Strategy and External Affairs at Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. Ms. Phillips is an Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. She has a Bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe College at Harvard University and holds a Master of Public Health degree from the University of Michigan.