UMass Biostatistics and Epidemiology to Host National COVID Response Expert for Online Seminar

The Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, part of the School of Public Health and Health Sciences, will host a seminar titled “Clinical Trials in the Emerging Infectious Disease Setting” on Friday, April 15 at 10 a.m. via Zoom.

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The talk, which is free and open to the UMass campus community, will be given by Natalie Dean, assistant professor in the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. Dean has become a major national figure in the science communication around the COVID-19 response, with commentaries published in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and appearances on CNN, NPR and Good Morning America. She has developed a Twitter following that exceeds 135,000.

“Dr. Dean has emerged during the pandemic as a tremendously effective translator of important and technical statistical ideas into terms that everyone can understand,” says biostatistician Nicholas Reich, professor in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences and director of the UMass-based COVID-19 Forecast Hub.

In this talk, Dean will discuss some of the unique challenges associated with conducting clinical trials of new vaccines and therapeutics against emerging infectious diseases. She will describe her previous work evaluating Ebola vaccine efficacy using an innovative ring vaccination strategy, and talk about how these efforts and planning during the Zika epidemic shaped public health thinking around evaluating a new chikungunya vaccine.

In light of the urgent need to evaluate vaccines and therapeutics during the COVID-19 pandemic, Dean’s talk will highlight successes and failures, and offer her insights into how we can improve clinical research. She also will reflect on her experiences engaging with the media and public during the pandemic and discuss some lessons learned and thoughts for the future.

For more information about the event, contact Tonya Menard at tonyamenard@umass.edu.