Heston Warr

Dr. Nicole Basta Vaccine development/communications/clinical trails/vaccine approval/Knowledge translation Many of us asked from the start of the pandemic, “When will we have a COVID-19 vaccine?” Dr. Basta developed a COVID-19 Vaccine Development Tracker to inform the public about progress in vaccine development and regulatory approval. She engaged with media outlets to ensure a wide range of audiences would have access to information about how many vaccines were being tested, in which phase of development, where clinical trials were taking place, and which countries had approved vaccines. Her work on this public health communications tool builds on her entire career which has been devoted to improving trust in and uptake of vaccines in order to positively impact society. The tracker (covid19.trackvaccines.org) has had more than 450,000 unique users from 226 countries. Home http://nicolebasta.com

Dear Pandemic Social media/infodemic/science communication/spanish language I am nominating the team behind the social-media based COVID-19 science communication campaign, Dear Pandemic because they have gone above and beyond to meet the World Health Organization’s call-to-action for scientists to intervene against the COVID-19 infodemic. Dear Pandemic is a science communication campaign that aims to provide curated, comprehensive, and timely information about COVID-19 to a general audience on social media. For more than a year, Dear Pandemic’s volunteer team has been faithfully committed to the mission of helping everyday people navigate the overwhelming amount of COVID-19 information circulating on social media. Combined, the team of more than 20 scientists has volunteered thousands of hours to this mission and has answered nearly a thousand reader questions. Dear Pandemic’s readership has grown to reach more than a million people per month. Their Spanish-language channel, in particular, has seen 10-fold growth in the last 6 months. What is more, the women behind the project have done this on top of juggling the responsibilities of their full-time jobs, tenure pressures, families, and routines that were upended by the pandemic. As one reader put it, “In the chaos that has been our world in the past year […]

Dr. Khaleel Hussaini Maternal and child health/data linkages/perinatal quality collaborative/hospital-based COVID-19 response surveillance/contact tracing Khaleel Hussaini, PhD has been the CDC Maternal and Child Health Field Assignee to Delaware (DE) since 2016. He is currently assisting the DE Perinatal Quality Collaborative (DPQC) with hospital-based COVID-19 response surveillance. In this role, he provides need-based technical assistance to address COVID-19 maternal health issues. He also assists the state with its contact tracing efforts making data linkages between the DE Electronic Lab Reporting system and data from other sources to help identify cases that require further investigation. He previously assisted the state’s Emergency Operations Center making calls and updating line lists to aid contact tracing efforts. https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/mchepi/assignees.htm

Dr. Amanda Bennett COVID-19 surveillance/pregnant women/hospital surveys/COVID-19 pregnancy module/congregate living settings Amanda Bennett, PhD, MPH has been the the CDC Maternal and Child Health Field Assignee to Illinois (IL) since 2015. As a part of her assignment, she assists the IL Department of Public Health (IDPH) with several COVID-19 surveillance activities among pregnant women, including developing hospital surveys to track testing practices. She also helped develop systems and processes to collect data for the COVID-19 Pregnancy Module, to obtain case report data from birthing hospitals conducting universal SARS-CoV-2 testing at labor and delivery admission, and to monitor trends in key MCH indicators throughout the pandemic. Amanda previously assisted IDPH with tracking COVID-19 cases in congregate living settings and developing a strategic plan for proactive testing in long-term care facilities. https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/mchepi/assignees.htm

Dr. Susan Manning State, Tribal, Local, and Territorial Support/pregnancy-associated deaths/COVID-19 pregnancy module/surveillance for merging threats to mothers and babies network/quarantine medical officer Susan Manning, MD, MPH has been the CDC Maternal and Child Health Field Assignee to Massachusetts (MA) since 2012. She has supported both state and CDC response efforts. Susan is currently deployed full-time to the CDC COVID-19 Response’s Pregnancy and Infant Linked Outcomes Team (PILOT) and serves as the CDC’s Senior State-based Point of Contact for MA in the State, Tribal, Local, and Territorial Support (STLTS) Task Force. Susan is leading the MA team in the CDC Epidemiology Working Group to provide guidance on identifying pregnancy-associated deaths with a history of SARS-CoV-2 infection. She assisted with the implementation of COVID-19 pregnancy surveillance in MA using the COVID-19 Pregnancy Module and through the Surveillance for Emerging Threats to Mothers and Babies Network (SET-NET), which was featured in the Mass Public Health Blog. She also worked with state subject matter experts on other COVID-19 activities, including transitioning to telehealth and preparing for the reopening of home visiting programs. She previously deployed to Los Angeles airport as a Quarantine Medical Officer to obtain medical histories from passengers to assess for possible COVID-19 infection. […]

Dr. Elizabeth Harvey Pregnancy/infant/surveillance/MIS-C/data quality Elizabeth Harvey, PhD, MPH has been the CDC Maternal and Child Health Field Assignee to Tennessee (TN) since 2017. To support the TN Department of Health’s COVID-19 Response, she co-leads the COVID-19 pregnancy and infant follow-up surveillance project. She conducts surveillance of COVID-19 and MIS-C in children and continues to assess MCH emerging issues during the pandemic. She is also collaborating with other assignees to examine birth outcomes during COVID-19. During a previous deployment, she assisted with data quality projects, including verifying hospitalization status on the Person Under Investigation (PUI) form through cross-matching provisional hospitalization data in the state. Elizabeth co-authored the MMWR: Birth and Infant Outcomes Following Laboratory-Confirmed SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Pregnancy – SET-NET, 16 Jurisdictions, March 29-October 14, 2020, and a research letter in JAMA Pediatrics on changes in preterm birth rates during TN’s stay-at-home orders. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6944e2.htm?s_cid=mm6944e2_w%22%20t%20%22_blank https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2777304  

Dr. Susanna Binzen Community interventions/critical populations/communication materials/protective measure/social media messages Susanna Binzen was deployed to the CDC’s COVID-19 Response Communications Team on the Community Interventions and Critical Populations Task Force for 5 months. She provided editing, proofreading, and facilitation for communication materials such as web pages, fact sheets, and guidance, and provided concepts and support for social media messages. Examples of her team’s social media messages include COVID-19 Ventilation, How to Prevent Getting Sick, and Protective Measures, which have thousands of views or likes on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Centers for Disease Control (@cdcgov) View this post on Instagram A post shared by Centers for Disease Control (@cdcgov)  

Dr. Mary Jo Trepka Leadership/experienced/hardworking/innovative/excellent communicator As doctoral students in the Department of Epidemiology at Florida International University (FIU), it is with great pleasure that we nominate our chair and professor, Dr. Mary Jo Trepka, for the Society of Epidemiological Research Above and Beyond Coronavirus Distinction award. Dr. Trepka is well suited for this award because of her tireless efforts and innovative approaches in establishing FIU’s COVID-19 response to ensure the safety and wellbeing of our students, faculty and staff, and her leadership role in Miami-Dade’s County response to COVID-19. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Trepka has provided her service to the university and our Miami-Dade County community. She currently serves as the chair of the COVID-19 screening, testing, tracing, and disinfection subcommittee of FIU’s Repopulation Task Force as well as a member of the FIU Task Force’s Health Subcommittee. In these roles, she developed essential protocols and promoted recommendations on safety measures against COVID-19, including masking, hand washing, physical distancing, lockdowns and travel restrictions. She has invested her resources in promoting mitigating measures to COVID-19 transmission by holding several webinars and FIU townhalls to the students, faculty and staff. Dr. Trepka is also a member of […]

Dr. Emma Sacks Epidemiologist/advocating for children/global health equity/frontline/volunteer Dr. Sacks, perinatal and pediatric epidemiologist, lead one of the teams synthesizing evidence on SARS-CoV-2 transmission risk in pregnant women, neonates, infants, and children, for UNICEF. An advocate for global health equity, she worked with Ministries of Health in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to procure equipment and develop trainings for safe neonatal and pediatric oxygen administration. Growing up and living in upper Manhattan, one of the earliest and hardest hit regions, she served as a volunteer with PPE2NYC and NYCares to organize emergency supply donations to NYC hospitals, contracting COVID herself while on the frontlines, and she currently volunteers at a mass vaccination site through the NYC Medical Reserve Corps. Dr. Sacks is one of many behind-the-scenes scientists working to keep everyone safe.  

Dr. Mathieu Maheu-Giroux Public service/commitment/scientific rigor and precision/policy decision support/responsiveness Dr. Mathieu Maheu-Giroux has been working non-stop since the pandemic arrived in Quebec, the epicenter for Canada from the beginning. He quickly pivoted from his research on HIV to address the critical situation the pandemic brought to all. Mathieu and his colleagues and students immediately mobilized their intellectual resources to focus on Covid-19 and have sustained this intense responsiveness throughout the pandemic. Dr. Maheu-Giroux’s unwavering work and commitment to changing the course of the pandemic and its consequences provided continuous synthesized information and distinct scenarios based on alternative decision strategies. His prediction models forecasting hospitalizations, as well as the models describing and predicting the spread of the infections have been, and continue to be, foundational guideposts among the key elements in developing and continuously adapting the pandemic responses by the Premier and the Directors of Public Health. In recognition of his contributions above and beyond, he was recently awarded the Scientist of the Year Prize by Radio-Canada, a distinction rarely granted to an epidemiologist. https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1763158/scientifiques-annee-2020-radio-canada-modelisateurs-pandemie?fbclid=IwAR1V56IFHH-yV8rZWSMowlLar_wyTpK9kCu4Qi4fix2dmT58Qgct5rvoZk4