To Be or Epidemiology?

Nora E Jameson MPH MS is a transgender-nonbinary scientist, educator, DJ, and stand-up comedian who has worked at the bench for over 10 years doing biology and chemistry. After dropping out of a chemistry phd program with a MS thesis, and then a biomedical sciences PhD program, they decided to pursue their volunteer work and social justice work towards a profession in Public Health. They worked during the COVID19 Omicron wave as a COVID epidemiologist in Portland Oregon and they are now studying for their PhD in social epidemiology at the University of Maryland College Park-School of Public Health.

Their talk provided an introduction to the field of public health and CDC’s 10 essential public health services. They talked about their training in Public Health Practice and their time as a COVID epidemiologist in Portland OR and introduced the “People’s CDC” resource. They also talked about their current PhD field of study: epidemiology and their subspecialties including social epidemiology, non-cisgendered populations, violence prevention and gun violence.