CLASS NEWS
Class of 1999: On the Front Lines of Public Health Hope Hamrick Biswas ’99 and Katie Curran ’99 have both been working as Epidemic Intelligence Service officers with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Hope is in the second year of the two-year applied epidemiology fellowship, and Katie finished in June 2016. Hope: I’ve been interested in epidemiology since my time at Westminster. For my final project in my AP Statistics class, I designed a study to compare the proportions of children at Westminster who had chickenpox before and after the chickenpox vaccine became available. My EIS assignment is at the California Department of Public Health. On a day-to-day basis, I could be working on anything from analyzing data on congenital syphilis to investigating an outbreak of Salmonella at a summer camp. So far, the highlights of my EIS fellowship have been helping set up a system to monitor pregnant women and infants with Zika infection in Colombia and helping coordinate the rapid response to a meningococcal disease outbreak at a university in California. It is incredibly rewarding to work at the CDC, where I can apply my skills and training to protect and improve public health.
Hope Hamrick Biswas ’99 investigates a campground after a plague patient visited Yosemite National Park. Her investigation involved trapping rodents and testing their fleas for Yersenia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague in humans.
58 | Spring 2017
Katie: In addition to Westminster’s rigorous academic training and AP Statistics (great preparation for biostatistics coursework during public health training), I was inspired by taking “School for the Common Good,” in which we learned about social justice and community service. My career in public health was shaped by an interest in science and public service, a desire to improve the health of populations, and personal experience—my dad worked at the CDC for 25 years. As an EIS officer, I was able to serve as “boots on the ground” in many different investigations and responses including Ebola in Sierra Leone, cholera in Kenya and Tanzania, and an outbreak of E. coli in Washington state among school-aged children attending a dairy education event. Curiosity, flexibility, and collaboration are critical during outbreak response—you work with a wide range of partners, and plans and priorities change as you learn new information. I now work with the Global Tuberculosis Branch in the Division of Global HIV/AIDS and TB at the CDC in Atlanta.
Katie Curran ’99 works with disease surveillance officers as part of the Ebola response in Sierra Leone.