Katie Raby

When asked about why she decided to work in public health, Maria Gallo, PhD, College of Public Health associate professor of epidemiology, thought back to when she was a Peace Corps volunteer in a small village in Nicaragua about 20 years ago. Gallo witnessed that people fell ill with a “mysterious hemorrhagic fever.” Until a team from the Centers for Disease Control arrived and identified the outbreak of leptospirosis, the cause was unknown.

Gallo says that “seeing a field investigation unfold in real life was powerful.”