Susan Diaz has an MPH in Tropical Public Health & Infectious Disease Epidemiology. Her internship and subsequent fellowship training were conducted at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) / National Centers for Infectious Diseases (NCID) / Division of Viral Hepatitis (DVH). During her internship, she worked on the Gates Foundation’s Central Asian Republic (CAR) project under Michael O. Favorov, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc.. Read more
During her fellowship, Susan launched and completed The ICBS Master Panels Viral Diagnostics project aimed at building master panels in HBV, HCV, and HIV, also funded by a grant from the Gates Foundation to The New York Blood Center / ICBS. These manufactured panels were then utilized in independent, evaluation studies of all available HBV and HCV developing world assays (purchased on the open market), conducted by the Paul Ehrlich Institut (PEI). The published results were awarded the Best Paper Prize by the International Society for Blood Transfusion’s (ISBT) Vox Sanguinis journal. During her fellowship at the CDC, Susan was unanimously voted to the ICBS Executive Board as its only MPH-level board member. Later, she became a Founding Member of ICBS-Europe, alongside the late Founder of ICBS, Alfred M. Prince, M.D.. She left the CDC upon receiving an invitation from the outgoing CDC Director of the Division of Viral Hepatitis, Harold S. Margolis, M.D., to work directly for him at the Emory Vaccine Center on the Pediatric Dengue Vaccine Initiative (PDVI); also funded by the Gates Foundation. Here, she served as a part of the PDVI Working Group, working with the CDC, WHO regional offices, and Health Canada on the construction of the Dengue Virus Master Panels. Susan was awarded further fellowship training at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) / Clinical Center / Department of Transfusion Medicine / Infectious Diseases Section, where she continues to work on NIH Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) and the NIH Transfusion-Related Infections Prospectively Studied (TRIPS) studies directly under her longtime mentor, Harvey J. Alter, M.D., M.A.C.P. (Nobel Prize Winner and Laureate in Physiology or Medicine 2020 for the discovery of HCV). Susan was the only MPH-level admittee into Harvard Medical School’s Global Clinical Scholars Research Training (HMS GCSRT) Program for Clinician-Scientists (Class of 2017-2018). Throughout her program, she was the designated leader of her Harvard team of clinician-scientists. Susan graduated with a Concentration in Advanced Quantitative Methods of Epidemiology and was the class-elected speaker of GCSRT at the graduation ceremonies held at Harvard Medical School. She is a member of the SER Membership and Nominations Committee and the Chair of the SER Masters and Nonacademic Subcommittee. Susan is highly enthusiastic about promoting the mission of SER; and devoted to bringing this special, professional experience to new and established members.
