About me

Hi,

I’m Nina. I have a PhD and MPH in Epidemiology from the University of Michigan, and spent the last 4 years as a disease detective and epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I’ve always been interested in science, infectious diseases, and vaccines, and I studied chemistry in college with the hopes of engineering vaccines in the lab. Unfortunately, lab life was definitely not a good fit for me, but vaccine epidemiology was where I found my passion.

Over the last decade, through working in industry, academia, and the federal government, I found my groove: understanding not how to make better vaccines in the lab, but how to ensure that they are effectively implemented in populations. The key to this is understanding how and why effective vaccines may fail to reach their potential effectiveness. One of the biggest reasons is due to individuals choosing not to get vaccinated or not to vaccinate their children.

In order to solve the problem, we need to identify why people aren’t vaccinating and helping people to understand the role community and transmission play in whether or not you’ll get sick from an infectious disease. I have spent the last 10 years understanding what personal beliefs may threaten vaccine uptake, and how individuals with these beliefs might cluster together. Are these beliefs due to misunderstanding? Misinformation? What societal structures make vaccination difficult? What financial obstacles exist to vaccinating, and how can we improve them? Misinformation and anti-science/vaccine rhetoric is likely to skyrocket now that Robert F. Kennedy is our HHS Secretary, making this task even more important.

Through this blog, I hope to cut through some of the inaccessibility of scientific research and writing, and find ways to share my research and my opinions (never without citations!).

Thanks for joining me, hold onto your hats!