Colloquium: Engines of Change in Public Health and Outbreak Response

About the Speaker

Caitlin Rivers, Ph.D., MPH, is the director of the Center for Outbreak Response Innovation and an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is an epidemiologist specializing in public health preparedness and response for epidemics, pandemics and deliberate biological threats.

Rivers has served as an author or contributor to several influential reports that shaped the U.S. response to COVID-19, including “National Coronavirus Response: A Roadmap to Reopening,” “A National COVID-19 Surveillance System: Achieving Containment,” “Filling in the Blanks: National Research Needs to Guide Decisions About Reopening Schools in the United States” and “A National Plan to Enable Comprehensive COVID-19 Case Finding and Contact Tracing in the U.S.” She was the lead author of “Public Health Principles for a Phased Reopening During COVID-19: Guidance for Governors,” which informed reopening strategies for the National Governors Association, the state of Maryland and the District of Columbia.

In May 2020, Rivers testified before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies on the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Before joining Johns Hopkins, Rivers worked as an epidemiologist at the U.S. Army Public Health Center and was a Department of Defense SMART Scholar. She also participated in the National Science and Technology Council’s Pandemic Prediction and Forecasting Science and Technology working group. She currently serves as an associate editor of the journal Health Security.

She is the author of the book Crisis Averted, which explores how the United States can strengthen its preparedness for future public health emergencies.