Emily Gurley is a Distinguished Professor of the Practice in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and has worked in Bangladesh for two decades. She spent 12 years at the icddr,b in Dhaka, Bangladesh where she investigated outbreaks and built public health surveillance systems with government partners, and served as the Director of icddr,b’s Emerging Infections Program. Her interests include development of novel surveillance strategies and improving the communication and collaboration between field epidemiologists and infectious disease modelers. She leads multi-disciplinary studies on the transmission and prevention of emerging and vaccine preventable diseases, such as Nipah virus, hepatitis E, and arboviruses. Her research adopts a One Health approach to the study and prevention of infectious disease, taking into account the ecological context in which human disease occurs. Emily’s current work on Nipah virus spans field work to identify mechanisms of spillover to development of consent processes for testing new vaccines to modeling use cases for vaccine deployment. 

Emily is the Co-Director for the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance (CHAMPS) site in Bangladesh, which uses minimally invasive post-mortem tissue sampling to determine the etiology of and prevent stillbirths and child deaths. She is the lead for the Bat Virus Spillover Evidence Compendium (Bat-Com), which is building a publicly accessible summary of all existing evidence about bat virus spillovers. She also serves on the Board of Directors for the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH), as a commissioner for the Lancet Commission on Prevention of Viral Spillovers, and works with Insight Net, the US National Outbreak Analytics and Disease Modeling Network funded by the US CDC.