Spotlight Webinar Series: Coronavirus and Biosecurity

Please join us for the Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction's (CSWMD) virtual Spotlight Seminar on Coronavirus and Biosecurity. The panel will feature experts in the fields of bioterrorism, biosurveillance, and infectious disease who can provide timely context for the outbreak. Panelists will assess the response to the public health emergency by the United States and China and discuss what this novel coronavirus may teach us for future natural and intentional biological events.

If you have any questions about the event, please contact the CSWMD Admin staff at CSWMD-Admin@ndu.edu.

Biographies:

Dr. Diane DiEuliis is the Assistant Director and Senior Policy Fellow at CSWMD. Her research areas focus on emerging biological technologies, biodefense, and preparedness for biothreats. Specific topic areas under this broad research portfolio include dual use life sciences research, synthetic biology, the US bioeconomy, disaster recovery, and behavioral, cognitive, and social science as it relates to important aspects of deterrence and preparedness. Dr. DiEuliis currently has several research grants in progress, and guest lectures in a variety of foundational professional military education courses. Prior to joining NDU, Dr. DiEuliis was the Deputy Director for Policy, serving as Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy and Planning, in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. While there, she coordinated policy in support of domestic and international health emergency preparedness and response activities, including implementation of the Pandemic All-Hazards Preparedness Act, the National Health Security Strategy, and the Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise (PHEMCE).

Dr. Gigi Gronvall is a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is an immunologist by training. Dr. Gronvall’s work at the Center for Health Security addresses the role of scientists in health security—how they can contribute to an effective technical response against a biological weapon or a natural epidemic. She is particularly interested in developing policies that will boost the safety and security of biological science activities while allowing beneficial research to flourish. Dr. Gronvall is the author of the books Synthetic Biology: Safety, Security, and Promise and Preparing for Bioterrorism: The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Leadership in Biosecurity.

Dr. Rohit Chitale joined DARPA as a program manager in 2019. He is an infectious disease epidemiologist with more than 20 years of experience helping national and international organizations establish and lead programs related to infectious disease prevention and eradication, with specific expertise in the design and implementation of disease surveillance systems and the development of new disease control tools. Before coming to DARPA, Dr. Chitale co-established the Global Disease Detection Operations Center at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the first event-based all-hazards surveillance unit at the CDC. He also served as the CDC Country Director in the Republic of South Sudan. In a prior role at the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), he established and led the Division of Integrated Biosurveillance within the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center to address capability gaps in DoD biosurveillance and global health security operations. In that role, he led efforts to integrate syndromic, case-based, and event-based disease surveillance systems across civilian, military, and veteran populations to decrease the time to disease detection, diagnosis, and treatment. While at DoD, he helped write the Global Health Security Agenda legislation. Previously, at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Dr. Chitale co-created The MENTOR Initiative — a public-private partnership designed to test and evaluate (pre-clinical, Phase I, II, and III trials) new vector-borne disease control technologies.

Moderated by Sarah Jacobs Gamberini, Policy Fellow, CSWMD.