UCLA Fielding School of Public Health epidemiologist available for expert comment on Ebola outbreak in Central Africa

Anne Rimoin, Professor of Epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health (FSPH) and Infectious Disease Division of the Geffen School of Medicine, in available for comment on the current Ebola outbtreak in Central Africa.

Rimoin is director of the UCLA FSPH Center for Global and Immigrant Health and is an internationally recognized expert on emerging infections, global health, surveillance systems, and vaccination.

Her pioneering work has focused on the emergence of infectious disease in populations living at the intersection of animal-human contact primarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It has led to fundamental understandings of the long-term consequences of Ebolavirus in survivors and yielded several important discoveries including the emergence of monkeypox since the cessation of smallpox vaccination, the identification of a new pathogen (Bas Congo Virus) and novel strains of Simian Foamy Virus in humans.

Rimoin has been working in the DRC since 2002, where she founded the UCLA-DRC Health Research and Training program to train U.S. and Congolese epidemiologists to conduct high-impact infectious disease research in low-resource, logistically-complex settings. Her team is also leading efforts to assess vaccine efficacy and durability of immune response to Ebolavirus vaccine in outbreak settings in the DRC. Her team also leads health mapping activities for better disease surveillance to better understand population immunity to vaccine preventable diseases and coordinated studies of the epidemiology, natural history, and pathogenesis of acute and asymptomatic viral hemorrhagic fever infections in populations. She has been a strong advocate for capacity building in low resource settings and conducting disease surveillance in complex emergencies. Rimoin is currently leading a study of COVID19 transmission among the Los Angeles health workforce.

Dr. Rimoin has published more than 70 research articles and book chapters. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, WIRED, Discover, Scientific American, Popular Science, Forbes, National Geographic, Nature and Science. She also appears frequently on television and radio discussing major issues surrounding disease emergence and has recently been a leading voice on the COVID19 pandemic in national news for CNN, MSNBC and Fox Business News.

Major supporters of Dr. Rimoin’s research include: the Food and Drug Administration, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the US National Institutes of Health (NIAID-NIH), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Faucett Catalyst Fund and other private and public organizations. She was recently inducted as a Fellow of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

Dr. Rimoin earned her B.A. in African History at Middlebury College, M.P.H. (Community Health Sciences) at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and Ph.D. (International Health) at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She also served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Benin, West Africa where she began her career in public health with UNICEF and the Carter Center. 

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