Career Development : Calendar

Covering COVID-19: Two experts offer up-to-date answers

03/27/20

Recorded March 27

The COVID-19 pandemic is quickly evolving and finding up-to-date answers to questions from experts has been challenging for many journalists. Join two experts from Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security – a physician, with a specialty in emergency medicine, critical care, pandemic preparedness and infectious diseases and a public health expert ­– who will answer your questions about what is known about the virus, how the health system is responding, how the outbreak might end and strategies for journalists to combat misinformation.

To ensure that we address your questions, you are invited to submit them ahead of time using this form.

• Amesh Adalja, M.D., F.I.D.S.A., senior scholar, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security

• Tara Kirk Sell, Ph.D., M.A., senior scholar, assistant professor

• Moderator: Bara Vaida, AHCJ core topic leader/infectious diseases

Amesh Adalja (@AmeshAA) is a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. His work is focused on emerging infectious disease, pandemic preparedness, and biosecurity. He has served on U.S. government panels tasked with developing guidelines for the treatment in mass casualty settings and the system of care for infectious disease emergencies. He has served as an external advisor to the New York City Health and Hospital Emergency Management Highly Infectious Disease training program, as well as on a FEMA working group on nuclear disaster recovery. Adalja is a native of Butler, Penn., and actively practices infectious disease, critical care and emergency medicine in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, where he serves on the City of Pittsburgh’s HIV Commission and on the advisory group of AIDS Free Pittsburgh.

Tara Kirk Sell (@skirkell) is a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. At the Center, she conducts, manages, and leads research projects to develop a greater understanding of potentially large-scale health events. She serves as an associate editor of the peer-reviewed journal Health Security (formerly Biosecurity and Bioterrorism). Sell leads a number of projects focused on improving responses to emerging outbreaks. These include efforts to understand and find solutions for misinformation during highly feared infectious disease outbreaks and utilizing the wisdom of the crowd through an infectious disease prediction platform that develops forecasts about infectious disease outcomes. Sell completed her doctorate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the Department of Health Policy and Management, where she was a Sommer Scholar. Her dissertation work focused on public policy responses to emerging epidemics and specifically how the media and policy intertwine in the case of Ebola and the health consequences of these policy actions.