Caitlin Rivers | |
|---|---|
 Riversc. 2017 | |
| Born | United States |
| Other names | Caitlin Yeaton |
| Education | University of New Hampshire (BS) Virginia Tech (MPH,PhD) |
| Occupation | Epidemiologist |
| Years active | 2014-present |
| Employer(s) | Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (current) U.S. Army |
Caitlin M. Rivers is an Americanepidemiologist who as Senior Scholar at theJohns Hopkins Center for Health Security and assistant professor at theJohns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, specializing on improving epidemic preparedness. Rivers is currently working on the American response to theCOVID-19 pandemic with a focus on the incorporation of infectious disease modeling and forecasting intopublic health decision making.[1]
In 2011, Rivers received abachelor's degree inanthropology from theUniversity of New Hampshire, where she specialized inmedical anthropology.[2] She has said that she became interested inpublic health after readingTracy Kidder's book,Mountains Beyond Mountains, which was about anthropologist and physicianPaul Farmer's work on infectious disease eradication.[3]
In 2013, Rivers received amaster's degree in public health (MPH) with a concentration in infectious disease fromVirginia Tech. In 2015, she received aPhD in the Genetics, Bioinformatics & Computational Biology program, where she specialized incomputational epidemiology, from Virginia Tech.[4] Her thesis was on modeling emerging infectious diseases for public health support, using non-traditional, public available sources of data, such as data collected fromsocial media and Google search terms.[5] She specifically focused on data related to outbreaks ofavian influenza A (H7N9),Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV), andEbola virus disease (EVD).
During her post-graduate studies, Rivers was a graduate research assistant atBiocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech (formerly known as the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute) inBlacksburg, Virginia, where she built infectious disease models of emerging infectious diseases includingInfluenza A virus subtype H7N9,Middle East respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus, and the 2014-2015Western African Ebola virus epidemic – the latter in coordination with theU.S. Department of Defense. Rivers maintained the only source of digital repository of data during the Ebola outbreak. As part of this work she developedPython tools, interfaces, and tutorials for epidemiologists.[3]
From 2013 to 2015, Rivers was a civilian epidemiologist for theUnited States Army. She worked at theU.S. Army Public Health Center as part of theScience, Mathematics, And Research For Transformation (SMART) Defense Scholarship Program during her second year of her doctoral program.[3] Rivers worked on the Army's Acute Respiratory Disease Surveillance Program, where she worked with Army data to monitor and track trends in infectious diseases and pinpoint where they occur.
In 2017, Rivers became a Senior Associate at theJohns Hopkins Center for Health Security and Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering atJohns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her work centers on modeling outbreaks of infectious diseases to help understand how an outbreak unfolds, its trajectory, and what approaches to take to slow—and eventually stop—the spread.[6] She and her colleagues have advocated for integrating these modeling approaches in public health decision-making into an interdisciplinary field they call "outbreak science."[7] She has argued for the creation of a National Infectious Disease Forecasting Center, which would play a role similar to that of theNational Weather Service and act as a primary source of epidemiological models during times of crisis, while advancing the field.[8]
As it emerged in late 2019, Rivers has applied her expertise in computational epidemiology to forecast the effects of theCOVID-19 pandemic in the United States, using available data from previous outbreaks since thenovel coronavirus. She and her colleagues used data fromintensive care unit and inpatient bed needs in two Chinese cities (Wuhan andGuangzhou) to project what health care needs would be if and when the outbreak spread to the United States.[9][10] Their analysis concluded that if an outbreak similar to the scale of the outbreak in Wuhan occurred in an American city, ICU needs of COVID-19 patients alone would exceed hospital capacity.
Rivers has used Twitter as a means of communicating her analyses as new data become available, refining the public's understanding of the trajectory of the pandemic. She has collaborated with researchers at theUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst to analyze trends in flu-like illnesses that were notinfluenza and, in March, found some unusual activity that may correspond to incidence of COVID-19. The study concluded that further research was necessary to determine whether the data was indeed a signal that SARS-CoV-2 was causing widespread disease in the United States.[11] She also analyzed syndromic surveillance data from outbreaks in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore and found the containment measures they were taking were actually effective at "flattening the curve" of transmission and reducing infections.[12][13]
In March 2020, she co-authored a policy proposal through theAmerican Enterprise Institute, along with formerFDA commissionersScott Gottlieb andMark McClellan, former FDA chief of staffLauren Silvis, and public health expertCrystal Watson, with a step-by-step timeline on how to safely ease restrictions in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.[14][15] The plan outlines four phases, with triggers to move from one phase to the next, build on an epidemiology evidence base. In anop-ed that preceded the policy proposal, Gottlieb and Rivers argued that quarantining entire cities is unnecessary; instead, government officials should focus on well-coordinated mitigation measures across the country to reduce community spread.[16] Part of these mitigation measures also include providing relief for those who will be economically impacted by closures and medical costs.
Rivers is an advocate for theopen science movement, particularly as it relates to matters of public health and health security. When she began modeling the Ebola virus disease epidemic in 2014, she converted data released by ministries of health into amachine-readable format and shared it openly onGitHub, an open repository for collaborative work on software and code.[17] In the wake of theZika virus outbreak, she co-authored a perspective piece on the importance of making data sharing the norm in order to maximize readiness for public health emergencies, outlining challenges, such as the need for data standards for sharing, and potential solutions.[18][19] She has also worked to develop an ethical framework of research standards for analyzing and reporting on publicly available data, with a specific focus on data resulting from Twitter.[20]
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Wikidata ()Wikidata ()Wikidata ()Wikidata ()Caitlin Rivers, Anthropology; Exploring Childhood Obesity in Rural New Hampshire
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